When I first started my role at GE Aviation, I supported the LEAP engine line. So naturally I think it is the most amazing of all of the engines — the coolest, most advanced engine on the planet. I stand by this, and I come with receipts.
Most people don’t think of jet engines as beautiful pieces of art, but they are, and more. They are art, science and cool all factored into a package that can power you around the world. They are so advanced you forget that you are 30,000 feet up in the stratosphere in shirt sleeves reading a book or snoozing against the plane window.
MoMA in New York displays a GE90 jet engine fan blade, and maybe it doesn’t sound like much, but if you saw one in person, up close all black composite curves and silvery strength, you couldn’t help but marvel at its sleek design and engineering prowess. Each blade on the GE90 is four-feet long and weighs less than 50 pounds. The GE90-115B contains 22 of these blades.
But anyway, the LEAP. Ages ago the video team at work developed a timelapse of a mosaic that was destined for the exhibit Work/Surface. The LEAP was part of a series of large-scale murals inspired by the “Worker Murals” created for the Union Terminal opening ofin 1933.
Representing a range of Cincinnati industries and its workforce, including the Formica Corporation in Evendale, the mosaics were created from laser-cut Formica. Like the original murals, the Work/Surface mosaics begin as photographs taken during factory tours and include industries such as Formica (of course), GE Aviation, Rookwood Pottery, Rhinegeist Brewery, Verdin Company and Procter & Gamble.
Ray has never met a factory floor he didn’t love (and he works at P&G), so convincing him to go see a Formica mosaic of a jet engine was an easy task. We didn’t know the exhibit also included P&G before we got there but, lo and behold, there was a Tide mosaic in Formica as well.
Aviation's was the best. Or one of the best at least. No kidding.
It's so well done it looks almost 3-dimensional, but really these murals are gigantic puzzles put together with large and small pieces of Formica. Very cool.
P&G was the only one in the exhibit that didn't take their image from a factory floor. They went with a virtual reality scenario of workers from around the world collaborating via VR. The idea was cool but it didn't show well, and Ray was disappointed. He felt the P&G mural missed the boat on capturing industrial production. Paper plants or a diaper line are inherently fascinating to see, but that's not what they chose to show.
I posed him by it anyway.
Tomorrow is the last day it will be at the Weston, so you’ve mostly missed it. (Sorry.) But you can see the timelapse my coworkers created of it coming together.
Whatever I knew of f-stops and shutter speeds I have long forgotten. But I still remember the smell of the darkroom chemicals (vinegar mostly) and my love of burning and dodging light onto prints. The process as much as the product was the goal... of getting the light just-so, the shadows just-so, and considering if the final print accurately captured the feeling of the moment. At the Taft Museum of Art's current exhibit Ansel Adams: A Photographer's Evolution there is a replica darkroom to illustrate the printing process Adams underwent in his photography. Ray and I, on a self-guided art hop Saturday afternoon, both marveled at how much we still remembered about wet baths and red lights and how interactive and engaging (and time consuming) printing a single print was. So we're putting a darkroom in at our house. Ray doesn't know this yet but I've already ordered a few vats of stop-bath so Erie Avenue should be smelling like nostalgia and acrid fumes in no time. Well, probably not. But I did want to hold the exhibit and in my hands and not let it go. Retrospectives are great because you get to consider an artist in whole. What changes and iterations evolved over time, and how the world and friends and mentors shaped those changes.
"‘Here is the equivalent of what I saw and felt.' That is all I can ever say in words about my photographs; they must stand or fall, as objects of beauty and communication, on the silent evidence of their equivalence.” Ansel Adams
From his smaller, intimately sized early works to the grand-scale landscapes of sweeping mountain ranges later in his career, the exhibition showcases his changing aesthetic as a photographer and the ways he experimented with contrast and light on the same landscapes. I admit, I had never seen nor or heard of Moonrise, Hernandez, New Mexico before Saturday, apparently an icon of 20th-century photography. Thank you to the Taft Museum for enlightening me. Adams made over 1,300 prints of the image.
"Over time, he printed Moonrise progressively darker, with a jet-black sky, brighter clouds at the horizon, and crosses gleaming with light against a shadowy landscape." Exhibit Curator
Two of those prints are in the exhibit, an early print and another made 30-years later. It's marvelous to see how the same image changes in his mind over time. The story of how he captured the image is great too.
"The situation was desperate: the low sun was trailing the edge of the clouds in the west, and shadow would soon dim the white crosses."
The people I like best are those who describe the race against the setting sun on their perfect image as "desperate." Indeed, it would not be the same image if those crosses were not lit up in the churchyard. (And that star just above the moon... a star? Jupiter? Venus perhaps? Maybe Mars?) Seeing 'Moonrise' and 'Grand Tetons from Jackson Lake, 1940' is worth the price of admission for those three photos alone. You have until Sept. 16, GO. On the way out we checked-out Twisted, which is six tons of willow tree saplings twisted into a sculpture called "Far Flung." It's imaginative and cool and a bit bizarre.
Next up on the blog, stop 2, The Weston Gallery. Ray and I aren't often so cultured and ambitious, but we made the most of our Saturday with two different exhibits. Stay tuned.
