The Bruce Museum

  With my plans to visit the MET this weekend scuttled due to family demands, I turned my attention to the Bruce Museum in Greenwich. Never having been to the Bruce I knew little of what to expect. Unlike my experience at the Wadsworth last week, this visit proved to be underwhelming. Perhaps I should have done advanced research, then I would have known that it was as much a science museum as an arts museum. While arts and science share equal billing, it is heavily, at least as currently exhibited, towards science. Just to be clear, I love science and did enjoy the exhibits, but I came for art. Okay, enough ranting.

  The Bruce Museum of Arts and Science was once the mansion of Robert Moffat Bruce, a textile merchant. The mansion was built in 1853 and deeded to Greenwich upon his death in 1908. It first opened as a museum in 1912. In the early days it exhibited the works of local artist from the Cos Cob Art Colony, many of whom were American Impressionists.

Although there were scant few Impressionist paintings, few paintings at all form that matter, they did have an exhibit that recently opened and caught my attention. It is entitled Downsized: Small-Scale Sculpture by Contemporary Artists. The exhibits force the viewer to take a closer look than normal, a fact that the greeter is quick to remind.

  This first piece was created by British artist Matthew Simmonds and is called Millennium and was carved out of limestone.  The former architectural stone mason finds a strength and permanence in stone, believing it to the natural material to have an inherent connection with the Earth. The carving is as much about the negative spaces ad how the light plays off the openings which cast shadows that reveal something new at different times of the day, expressing something different for every viewer from every angle. The Carving is places on a waist high pedestal allowing for it to be viewed from all angles and vantage points.

American artists Walter Martin and Paloma Munoz collaborated on creating snow globes, but not your ordinary snow globes. These globes show a dark sense of humor, or what the information card describes as “subverting the familiar kitsch of a souvenir snow globe.”  Their series, called Travelers, has a hint of the absurd as ordinary scenes when viewed closely something is just a little off from the norm

Traveler 300, 2014

   Traveler 292, 2014

Next up is the work of Syrian artist Mohamad Hafez, who’s work is his therapy as he combats homesickness. Hafez creates art from the ravaged pieces of the country of his birth, which has been decimated since civil war broke out in 2011. He creates miniature versions of his old neighborhoods of Damascus. There is a great article about Hafez and his work at Aljazeera.com, where he says of his creations, “If you can’t go home, maybe you could recreate home.” His work is an example how artists can take personal tragedy and create a thing of beauty. The materials he used ran the gamut from laundry lines and random rubble from shelled buildings. Hafez, exhibiting the soul of aspiration says wistfully, on the information card, “It’s amazing, the resiliency in the human spirit. That is something I’d like to talk about in my art.”

Here are two examples of his work.

  Another interesting and whimsical display is that of Alan Wolfson, whose Occupied Hotel Room, invites viewers to peer into the miniaturized Monopoly board square of an imagined Baltic Avenue hotel. From an ordinary distance there appears to be little more that a cutout in the board game square. However, the closer you get the more of the tiny work is revealed.

 Looking through the opening, you are transported to a seedy, heavily lived in hotel room that one could imagine could have only been created with a steady hand and stellar patience. The level of detail is stunning, with even reflections in the tiny mirrors.

There wasn’t as much as thought there would be in the museum, but when a closer look is taken, there is some truly wonderful examples of art to behold

  

Cite

https://www.aljazeera.com/indepth/features/mohamed-hafez-homesick-syrian-artist-miniature-war-scenes-180313204226092.html