Pompeii and Circumstances

Opening this weekend at the National Gallery of Art is Pompeii and the Roman Villa exhibit. Of course, I can't wait for the general opening and decided to slip into the press preview today.

These are some of the most precious artifacts. With almost perfectly intact portrait busts and still life frescoes preserved from the era of Christ, would have any art historian salivating, I would know. But this is not your average snob fest showcase.

NGA went to great lengths to create a gallery for the masses. Here the patron is transported into a roman vacation home situated in Pompeii. From the moment you cross the Greek style threshold, complete with mosaic tiled dog welcome mat, you've stepped into this ancient villa resort.

 

Pompeii was a prosperous town, made wealthy by its agricultural goods like oil and wine. These products thrived from the rich nutrients provided by the same volcanic ash that would eventually envelop the area. Trade brought great wealth to Pompeii, and "anyone who was anyone had a vacation home in Pompeii, said guest curator Carol C. Mattusch.

Because these were vacations homes, they were used for entertaining, exercise and leisure. “They were fascinated with Greek Style." Mattusch explains. Homes often had several dining rooms, each with seasonal themes in executed in mosaics and frescos.

In this exhibit, entire rooms have been reproduced, but one of the more impressive is the courtyard of a Pompeian home. In the fashion of the Emperor Octavian's taste in the beginning of the century, focus on the interior gardens became the rage.

As you exit the gallery, an interesting tidbit of trivia…the Pompeian style can be scene daily today by some of the worlds most powerful. In the Senate Appropriations Committee room housed in the nation’s capital, the walls have been duplicated from this Greco-Roman Tradition. Something to ponder – the last one was buried in ash almost 2 millennia ago.

I Scream, You Scream

Sebastian Martorana creates memorials of ice cream pints made from stone (Ode to Ice Cream: Group of 6, pictured). Wanting to memorialize the quiet happy moments of life like sharing a pint of ice cream at the end of the day with his wife, he carved various flavors and consistencies of ice cream, asking "isn't that important too?" The realistic pints exude these emotions and while not as raw as the memorials to the dead and unborn, are just as heartfelt.

Introductions4 is on display through September 6, 2008. Irvine Contemporary is located at 1412 14th St NW and is open Tuesday through Saturday, 11 a.m. to 6 p.m.

This Just In....

So Tommy and I finally made it over to the relocated, redesigned NEWSeum!

Originally housed at Freedom Park in Roslyn, this homage to the fourth estate has reopened on the mall with it's museum brethren.

Aside from exhibiting history altering headlines and taped first drafts of history, the multi-storied building houses some amazing tangible chunks of time, like a full section of the Berlin Wall. The exhibit that blew me away was the 9-11 display. The museum has one of the radio towers from the trade center's roof.

It sucked the air right out of my lungs as I remember standing next to that same tower while it was posted in its original location. I was in eight grade in New York on our middle school trip to the east coast. My two friends and I had snuck up to the roof to observe the city from it's highest point.

We snapped a couple of 35mm, before hustling back downstairs to blend back into our tour group before our absence was noticed. Now that tower stands indoors, crippled, with a satallite of the worlds headlines posted to the wall from the day it came crashing down.

While I was having my oxygen depleated moment of realization, I looked on as a young teacher tried explaining to her rambunctious field trippers what that tower meant. She was up for the challenge, but the explanation fell hallow on the group, who couldn't have been more than 2 years old at the time.

Fear not, there was fun to be had as well! We both tried our hand at reading the teleprompter too! I reported from the Supreme Court and was just as laughable in April as I was in eighth grade!

Bad Boys Bad Boys

In a city renowned for it's world class museums with zero admission cost, it seems ludicrous to charge at all, let alone $18 bucks to enter the new Crime and Punishment museum in Gallery Place. But for any CSI fans in the crowd, it's worth it!

A Picture is worth.....

While Grant was visiting I insisted we stop into see the new photograph exhibit at the Corcoran. Magnum Photos and the Global Fund to Fight AIDS, TB and Malaria teamed up to document artistically the effect of free antiretroviral treatment in third world countries. The Fund was set up to not only address those afflicted by the disease who couldn't afford treatment, but also to slow if not stop the spread of the disease all together.

We arrived at the Access to Life exhibit expecting to wonder through at our leisure but the Media Relations Manager had set up a walk-through with Jonas Bendiksen, a Norwegian photographer with Magnum who chronicled Haiti, and Bill Horrigan, the curator of the exhibit.

The exhibit is actually a conglomerate of 8 separate photographer's work and each were given artistic liberty with how they wanted to showcases it throughout the somewhat narrow gallery.

"The real challenge was fitting everything in," Horrigan told us.

The photographers made two trips both lasting two weeks and separated with three months. Jonas decided to timeline four patients by bookending Polaroids the patients took of themselves with the intimate shots he was able to snap while in Haiti.

Upon closer inspection, some of the Polaroids included handwritten updates to supplement the photos. "Bien, mal" and so forth.

One observation Bendiksen offered was the patients here tended to have a higher survivor rate than those in the US. This was in part due to the drugs being free, but also because the village health professionals were more regimented about administering the drugs regularly.

In fact two of Bendiksen's patients recovered. But not all cases were optimistic. A majority of the exhibitions' subjects chronicled the diseases' powerful effect.

When asked how Jonas was able to cope with the subject matter, he said, "it's hard, you don't stop being human when you pick up a camera."

But he also says, " I love working on stories that get left behind in the race for the daily headlines - journalistic orphans. Often, the most worthwhile and convincing images tend to lurk within the hidden, oblique stories that fly just below the radar."