Visiting the Forces Exhibit at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

Visiting the Forces Exhibit at the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia by Savvy Mom Ruth Paget

It was easy to indulge Florence in art exhibits in Virginia Beach.  We took a brisk walk in Virginia Beach and then entered the Contemporary Art Center of Virginia.

They had a neat exhibit called Forces: Art of the End of the 20^th Century about work with non-traditional materials called “Basic Life Forces” as the brochure called it.  The work Laurent liked the best was called Russian Constructivism via Venice Beach 1994 by James Ossi.

This rectangular pane of glass spouted bubbles inside its sculptural framework.  Florence, the bubble princess, tried bursting the bubbles by reaching for the bubbles.

My favorite exhibit was Bubis Vekris’s work called Split Particles of Rain, 1995.  This work required you to enter a darkened room.  Red lights that looked like cascading particles of rain fell down around you in this room.

This rain exhibit led directly to Shu-Mia’s Holographic Floor, 1996.  We amused ourselves by walking around and seeing what emotion would be on a face popping up from the floor.

The faces in the holographic floor were all Asian, which brought back the prediction of my high school art history teacher, who said that “art will cross all national, racial, and gender lines in the 21^st century.” (Dr. Cletie Tyler – Cass Technical High School Art History Teacher and later Director of Art Instruction for Detroit Public Schools.  Susan Rice was also one of my Art History Teachers at Cass Tech.)

By four, Florence’s favorite exhibit was an entire room dedicated to the three-dimensional strobe light artwork called Mother May I? by Gregory Barsamain.

The strobe light whirled away to the side of the room and hanging from the ceiling in the center of the room was blue blob.

As the strobe light turned, a green hand would reach in and out and take out a ping-pong ball.  We danced in the room to the rhythm of the ping-pong ball.

Florence also rolled on the ground and ran into Laurent and me.  Then, we all got on the ground, crawling around, laughing.  Some serious art lovers came by and left the room, making us laugh even more.  We left, so they view the work.

Florence was certainly developing a love for modern art that day.

Later in the evening while I was sipping some Darjeeling tea, I thought of how expensive it is to produce modern art.

Holograms do not strike me as a cheap medium.  Who financed modern artists?  You had to be rich just to start out.

By Ruth Pennington Paget, author of Eating Soup with Chopsticks and Marrying France

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