Saturday, January 30, 2010

Home again

Ian woke up at about 5:30am this morning so we were on the road by 6am and home just after noon. You probably won't be surprised to read that I slept all afternoon :)

Yesterday I did go back to the Carnegie Art and Natural History Museums (these two museums are in one building) to see the exhibits I wasn't able to see the day before. I loved looking through the museum - they had a great dinosaur exhibit as well as a lovely whale exhibit.

I think I liked the exhibits in the museum of art more than the ones in the natural history museum. One exhibit was on photographs of Palm Springs Modern architecture. This architecture has lots of clean lines, big windows, and high-tech materials; the mid-century modern look. I don't know if I could live in a place like that (and it's not the right architecture style for Canada), but I love the look.

I also loved the Forum 64: Cecil Balmond exhibit, which was mainly comprised of an installation made of stainless steel sylized H-forms inserted into chains, making it look like it's being hung from the ceiling but in fact it's built from the ground up. I like his style - there are pictures here (the first is him standing in front of this exhibit). There were interesting math-related displays on the wall, too.

And of course I loved the exhibition involving the tapestries because they're textiles and I do love textiles. :) There was an example of a tapestry in progress and it was interesting to see how they were constructed, with the picture drawn behind it and the way the different colours are woven in together.

I didn't take pictures of that stuff, though - and not just because you're not supposed to take photos in these temporary exhibits, because people were taking photos. Almost all the photos I took were of rocks and minerals in the rock and mineral exhibit. I love rocks. I love the different textures the minerals make in the rocks; how some are smooth and others look like puffballs and some look like cubes. I love the infinite variety of these rocks - so much so that I visited that exhibit on both days I was there.

I also took a few pictures of some contemporary art pieces and a fossil or two... but most of my pictures are of rocks. You can see all the pictures I took here.

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