AGO - Art Gallery of Ontario

I went to art gallery last weekend for my 500 words assignment, we had to pick one of the piece to write about it. I was in line and it took me an hour to get inside!! but it was worth it. We were not allow to take pictures of the art works inside the gallery so I try to remember it to sketch it. I took few picture from outside of the gallery to show the transformation that has changed.

Walking through the revolving doors made me gasp in awe, no stairs, only a ramp. Where shall I go first? The galleries are large and spacious with good lighting. Wonder around for a while and you come back to the central foe. Here you see an almost modern wonder. A spiral stair case stands out on its own and leads to practically no where. This stair case holds it’s own as there are no displays around it. Walk again to the front of the building and the feeling you get is that you are in the inside of an up turned boat with the ribs curving inwards and around you which gives you an immense sense of spaciousness. On the opposite side of this are planks of douglas fir carved out to show the inner half of this mighty works of nature which I did not know existed until I saw it. What a wonderful insight and a genius of imagination. The redesigned art gallery in my opinion is something that was long overdue.

The most extraordinary exhibit that I found interesting was in the Corking Gallery on the second floor. This piece of sculpture was the work of David Amejd. The entire room was filled with a sculpture of immense proportions that was morbid, thought provoking and illusionary all at the same time. The first thing you see are mirrors everywhere that reflects the sculpture it self and the observer together which gives you a feeling of being a part of the sculpture.

You then see an animal may be a bear torn to bits by shards of pointed mirrored crystal and a human form with the head of a bird standing over it. What does this signify? Are the shards of crystal the will of humans destroying everything around it? At this point you don’t notice that the head of this animal is missing. Turn around again and there stands another human with the same birds head embedded with crystals in his hand stretched out. All this is happening in a tranquil forest atmosphere with birds and squirrels on the trees and life as we know it going on regardless of the events that you see. As if to side track all this a figure of a flying owl with star of David painted on his head and an eagle with wings spread out, but all the parts of the eagle are depicted by human fingers. What’s the connection? To summarize, this piece of work was the most outstanding and challenging experience that I recognized during my brief tour.