This past week, me, Aimee and Jerrica ventured out to Columbus Circle to complete our first Independent Visit. We were lucky enough to catch their marvelous exhibition, Slash, which is a compilation of designs and objects made entirely out of paper materials, whether it was cardboard or tissue paper. In order to achieve the desired effect, artists utilized distinct knives in order to cut through the different types of paper. As I walked around the museum, I observed many different mediums through which paper was being used. Sometimes, the paper was used to replicate something, such as a knight on a soldier holding up a sword beautifully crafted entirely out of cardboard. Another work depicted a battleship replica made out of pages from a hebrew book. The political message conveyed was extremely powerful, or so I thought.

The face of the man you see above was my favorite work of all. The work displayed a life-size naked man standing erect, looking straight ahead. If you looked closer, past the rainbow of colors covering his skin, you could see his skin itself and scary details like hair and very precise curves, shadows, everything! For a second, I thought the man was real. He could have been completely real, because the body was so true to life, only a sign of breath was needed to complete my belief that the man was real. I was tempted to touch in so that all of my senses to be convinced by this thought. When I read the placard by the work, I understood why the work had this effect on me. The artist took a real life man, molded the shape of his body in styrofoam and then took pictures of each and every section of his naked body and printed these out in larger scale. Then, the artist proceeded to manipulate the photographs, adding colors as he liked, and covered the styrofoam with the photographs. The time it took to accomplish this I cannot imagine, but I do know that this precise installation had the most impacting effect on me probably out of any aesthetic work of art I have witnessed. It confused my senses and confounded me, and it taught me an important lesson. What appears real never has to be completely real or completely fake.