Taking a Closer Look

By: Christine K.

When I realized that our first visit was going to be to the Des Moines Art Center, I’d have to say that I was pretty excited about it; in my own nerdy art world I cherish any opportunity to see someone else’s work. As an art major, all of my professors continuously recommended that we go visit the Des Moines Art Center. I never ended up getting to go while living in Iowa City. I am really happy that I was given the opportunity to see it now. Quite a few of the pieces I have seen before, and majority of the artists I have studied before. The artists from 2010 were actually a couple of my professors at Iowa, and one of them was even in a class with me. It was really interesting to see their work up on the wall.

Although I was really excited to see the art in the DMAC my decision to choose just one piece that intrigued me was still a hard one. My art major is actually a BFA in drawing, but towards then end of my college career I started to get into digital art. This was a huge change for me since I always felt very strongly that digital art was “cheating”, because it takes much more talent to actually create something with your hands than it does to tell a computer to do it. Although, one graphic design class completely blew my mind. I found a new appreciation and fascination for most digital art. This is the main reason I decided on Subdivision: Heavenly Heights by Ross Racine. The first time I walked by this image I just glanced at it, and thought it was a picture of the suburbs of some major city. Although it looked pretty cool it was not all that impressive as an art piece. After walking around the rest of the art center and returning to this image I decided to take a closer look. The image is not a photograph at all, but instead it is a digitally created image. The artist used repetition created by a computer program to design this piece. After going online and looking at other images of his I realized that his artwork is entirely from his imagination. He does not take a single image, such as a photograph, and repeat it. Instead he comes up with these designs all on his own, and uses different tools to give the images the effects that he wants; such as the shading in they sky or the shadows on the ground.

Sontag’s article mentions how photography is a way of putting oneself into an image and as a result can give you a sense of power (Sontag, 1973). Racine shows a sense of power in his digital images. He takes these creative ideas and turns them into what appears to be photographs of subdivisions. To put it in the simplest way possible, Racine is creating his own little worlds. There is an odd sense of power when you create a piece of art that is entirely your own. When you have the ability to create this vision from your mind, and then take it one step further and transform it into this matter for everyone else to see. What I find so amazing about his work is that it is all digitally rendered. The entire image is created on the computer. As an artist, I can not even imagine doing something like this with just a computer program and an image in mind.

Another reason I really like this image is because it fooled me. It made me believe it was something else, but after further investigation it made me realize that just a glance is not enough to understand this piece of work. It is actually very complex, and there are a couple ways that I see this piece. Like I said, at first it appears to be houses in a subdivision, but after realizing that it is a result of a repeating computer program then it also makes me view the piece in a computer programming way. Meaning that it changes how I perceive the piece; instead of seeing the houses simply as houses I then start think about them as digital data and informational fragments in which this piece would not be whole if any of this data was missing.

Works Cited

Sontag, S. (1973, October 18). Photography. The New York Times Review of Books ,p. Volume 20.