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This program is made possible through the generous support of the Cameron Baird Foundation.
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Lucas Samaras |
SUPPLIES
Pencil, paper, large refrigerator box or other large appliance box, mirrored paper or tiles, flashlight, small smooth rubber ball, a few handfuls of pebbles, assorted small boxes, and household materials.
BEFORE YOUR VISIT, SHOW THE TRANSPARENCY
Since the work of art under study is a three-dimensional space, the photograph you and the children see is hard to decipher. What do they see? Ask them to explore the picture and note the colors.
Ask them:
Can you find a table and chair?
What do you think the table and chair are made of?
Can you find a very old camera? (This was the camera used to take this photograph. It is not part of the artwork.)
Then tell them:
Imagine you are going to magically walk into this picture.
What would you smell?
What would you hear?
Who would you find inside?
What could they be doing?
Have students write a short paragraph about their answers.
LEARN ABOUT MIRRORS
Experiment:
Hold a small smooth rubber ball in your hand with your fingers facing the ground. Hold your hand very still and drop the ball carefully onto the smooth floor. Can you make it bounce straight back to your hand? Now take twenty or thirty pebbles or stones and place them close together on the floor where you are dropping the ball. Try dropping the ball the same way. Can you make it bounce back to your hand? Why do you think this happens?
You can think of your hand as your eye and the ball as a photon, or tiny bit of light. The smooth floor acts in a similar way to a mirror, sending the ball back to your hand just as a smooth piece of metal in a mirror sends bits of light (photons) right back to your eye so that you see objects in the mirror. Photons that hit a rough surface like the pebble-strewn floor will bounce off of the surface in a haphazard manner, while those that hit a smooth surface, such as a mirror, only bounce off of the surface at the same angle at which they hit the object. The scientific term for this phenomenon is reflection.
SOME INFORMATION THAT MAY HELP YOU ANSWER PRICKLY QUESTIONS
Not all smooth surfaces reflect photons back to us even though they should bounce back at the same angle at which they hit the surface. This exception to the rule results because some smooth surfaces
absorb light particles, making it impossible for them to bounce back. For example, you cannot see your reflection in your friend’s tennis shirt.
Another apparent exception to this rule is that although our bodies are rough, uneven surfaces, off of which light bounces at random angles, our images reflect off of a mirror. The reason for this apparent contradiction is simply that when we stand in front of a mirror, some, but not all, of the light particles bouncing off of us will hit the smooth surface of the mirror. The ones that do hit the smooth surface of the mirror reflect our image back to our eyes at exactly the same angle at which they hit the mirror.
In other words, photons that bounce off of any part of our bodies and hit the mirror reflect back to our eyes from only one place on the mirror, and at only one angle. It follows that each point on our bodies that reflects back to our eyes from one point on the mirror produces an image in the mirror. All of the images together make up our reflections, like it or not. And remember that mirrors do not lie!
DURING YOUR VISIT
Your students will be able to enter The Mirrored Room. They will have to remove their shoes and enter two at a time, while the rest wait outside. Do your students now recognize the picture that they
saw was The Mirrored Room?
As they wait to go in, the guide will ask questions such as:
What do you think would happen if you closed the door?
What do you see on the outside of the sculpture?
Are you part of the artwork now that you can see yourself in it?
After everyone has gone in, your guide will ask questions such as:
How many reflections of yourself did you see in the room?
If you only see one of your reflections in the bathroom mirror at home, why do you think you saw so many of yourself in The Mirrored Room?
The Mirrored Room is composed of twenty-four-inch square mirrors
attached to a plywood frame with screws that are covered by glass balls. No interior light source is incorporated; the single source of light is the open door.
AFTER YOUR VISIT
Now that the students have experienced The Mirrored Room, do they want to change the paragraphs they wrote? Let them edit if they want, and then read the edited stories.
OTHER CLASS EXPLORATIONS
This is best made as a project for a group of classes, or perhaps for the whole school.
Build your own mirrored room out of a box large enough for at least one child to stand in. Purchase mirrors as a sheet or tiles, or paper mirrors (see web resources below if you have trouble finding mirrors) and cover both the outside and the inside as best as you can. Make sure the door can close without letting much light in. Have them take their shoes off just like they did at the Gallery!
What do they see when the door is closed? When the door is open? What do they see when the door is closed and they shine a flashlight?
ART ACTIVITY: BASED ON OTHER WORK BY LUCAS SAMARAS
Collect a variety of small boxes, one per student, or purchase small boxes at a craft store. Have each student choose one common household substance and cover the box, inside and out, so that the original
box is not visible. Some ideas for materials to cover include Q-tips, paper clips, staples, yarn, matchsticks, buttons, cotton balls, macaroni, small pebbles, lint, dried beans, and dried peas.
Be careful – in order to close your box, it might be necessary to leave some sides without anything on them. Help each student to determine which sides to leave empty on his/her box. Writing an “x” on those sides might help them remember. Your students will find that for each different material, they will need a different strategy to effectively cover their box.
WEB RESOURCES
For mirrored paper:
For mirrored tiles:
For a short iMovie created by Lucas Samaras:
http://art.blogging.la/archives/2005/04/lucas_samaras_i.phtml.
FURTHER INFORMATION FOR EDUCATORS
Lucas Samaras was born in Macedonia, Greece and came to the United States in 1948. He attended Rutgers University from 1954 through 1959, experimenting with unusual art materials such as glass, aluminum
foil, and silver paint, which led to the use of mirrors later in his career. Early in his career, he made what he called “constructions”, many of which were box-like in nature. For decoration,
he used materials such as mirrors, tacks, colored yarn, fake gems, and other unorthodox substances. His fascination with colorful, glittering objects reflects his childhood memories of violence in
war-torn Greece, the jewel-like interiors of local Greek Byzantine churches, and his mother’s flamboyant taste.
Lucas Samaras’ box constructions were of modest dimensions until he recreated his bedroom, Room No. 1, in 1964. Room No. 2, later re-titled The Mirrored Room, was built in 1966. According to the artist, “The idea for a completely mirror-covered cube room occurred to me around 1963 when I incorporated the idea into a short story, Killman. The reason I used a cube rather than any other geometric shape was to minimize the number of planes that would reflect the space enclosed within them but still give a convincing illusion of perpendicular extension in every direction…I included a table and chair, two important objects that can be found in a room…A table and a chair for someone to sit down and imagine or think or discover. In terms of my other work, mirror as a surface is related to silver paint and tin foil that I was using during the late 1950s.”
Samaras studied art history at Columbia University from 1959-1962, participated in the performance Happenings of the late 1950s and early 1960s, and taught briefly at Yale University in 1969 and Brooklyn College from 1971-72. He is also very well known for his self-portraits created in various media including photocopy, painting, photography, and sculpture. In 1976, Samaras bought a sewing machine and began to produce “reconstructions,” compositions of sewn fabric scraps in electrically charged colors. As in most of his work, Samaras has mentioned an autobiographical source. As a child, he passed many hours in his cousin’s dressmaking shop, where he became fascinated by fabric and pins. He has also commented that these pieces are in memory of his mother, who had “wonderful, lousy taste.” The Gallery owns a work from this series, Reconstruction #28, 1977, which is a wall hanging created in fabric. Ever broadening his knowledge of new art materials, in April 2005 he created an exhibition of short films created with Apple iMovie technology that was shown at the Pace Wildenstein Gallery in New York City.