Event 3

This week, I went to the Hammer Museum for the Judith Hopf exhibition and it was quite fun and thought-provoking. Judith Hopf attempts to display the vitality of everyday objects through multiple medium including paintings, sculptures and short movies. I think many of the pieces would lead people to rethink their relationships with the seemingly plain objects that we encounter and use everyday.

In Hopf’s Waiting Laptops painting series, she gave the laptops emotions and characteristics that only humans have. Some laptops look sad and some look exhausted. Through their frequent interaction with us, our laptops have in some sense become extensions of ourselves. As I am typing this post on my laptop, weird as it may sound, I feel that the laptop have somehow absorbed my thoughts and helped preserve them. Hopf’s work really makes us reexamine our relationships that we have with our everyday objects.

A print from the Waiting Laptops series

There was also a series of sculptures made out of bricks, a kind of material rarely used in contemporary sculptures. Some of the sculptures also looked as if they were breaking through the floor, wall or ceiling. Her creative perspective really helped transformed the gallery into a fun place and attempted to upend the spatial constraints of the architecture.

A short video displaying a car which seems to have emotions

I would definitely recommend the Judith Hopf exhibition at Hammer to my fellow classmates. The exhibition is both fun and thought-provoking. While we take the objects that we use everyday for granted, we really should take a moment to think about how we interact with these objects and how they have become part of us.

Me at the exhibition