The Victoria and Albert museum was a labyrinth of historical archives and art pieces that I feel like I barely explored even though I never retraced my steps in the couple hours I was there. There were several cool things to see even with the theatre exhibit unfortunately being temporarily shut down. For instance there was a really interesting video exhibit called the Zizi experience, which featured a recorded drag performance run through a series of AI filters to essentially deconstruct and reconstruct the image in various ways. It was super cool, and I’m not really a fan of AI in the art world, but this was an interesting exception because it was being utilized to actively critique AI rather than embrace it.
However, probably my favorite thing I saw was the massive Chihuly piece that they had hanging in a large opening near what I felt like was the center of the museum but was in reality likely far from it. Chihuly is a glass artist who I have gotten the opportunity to see the work of several times over the years. The first time was during his exhibition several years ago at Crystal Bridges, of which some of the pieces have joined the museum’s permanent collection. Then the most recent time I can remember was last fall in Las Vegas, where there was an exhibit of ceiling mounted glass art in the Bellagio’s lobby.
This may seem weird, but seeing this Chihuly piece in specific reminded me of The Curious Case of Benjamin Button which a group of us went to see earlier this trip. For me it was the color scheme of the glass as well as the sense of movement it conveyed, somehow I felt it captured the essence of the mood that surrounded Benjamin Button. It felt like a splash of water, reminiscent of the water that Benjamin tried to save his daughter from, or the water that he tries to end his life in before returning home. The show was beautiful and intricate and took so much skill to make happen, and Chihuly’s work is very similar in those regards. At the end of the day art is meant to make you feel something, and though the mediums of glass and theatre are nowhere close to each other I still felt a similar feeling from both pieces, and that’s a beautiful thing.
Theatre in London U of A 