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Hi, I am Dan and I am going to narrate this artwork which is called the Dallas Snake.
The Dallas Snake resides in the Dallas museum of Art in the sculpture garden.
After seeing many sculptures in this garden, the one sculpture that really caught my attention
was this artwork you see in the picture. This artwork you see is very unique. It consist
of many objects thrown together to create some type of image for the viewers to see.
Objects that I see in this artwork are a streetlamp, a crowbar, metal beams, plastic tubes, and
a big chain to hold everything together. To me it looks as if this artwork is trying
to replicate some type of animal, probably a snake.
The reason I know this is because the shape of it altogether forms a really long body
like structure. The chain and pipe bend in a twisted fashion
to form the body of the snake. The lamp also looks like some type of head
connected to the rest of the parts below. I really like this artwork since I prefer
sculptures more than paintings, and especially if a sculpture represents some type of figure
in the world using completely different and unique materials.
The lamp also lights up, and that is the red light you see in the picture. According to
the credit line Mark Handforth was the creator of the sculpture.
He was born in Hong Kong in 1969 and named this sculpture the Dallas Snake. It was made
in the year 2007 and consists of steel, aluminum, and a street lamp.
Mark Handforth was probably very interested in the city life and snakes.
It could be that he never lived or been in a city like Dallas and finally saw it first
hand, or that he was just amazed at the structure of a city and wanted to make art out of it.
What makes me believe that he was interested in those things was the way he had put together
the snake like sculpture. When you do think about it, a chain is always
loose and can bend and twist to from many different shapes.
That is probably why he had used a chain to replicate the snake.
Obviously the lamp is supposed to replicate the head of the snake, and the crowbar which
is kind of hard to see in the picture, could represent the tail of the snake, kind of like
a rattlesnake. Whenever I take a look at the artwork, it
makes me feel very creative. If someone can make a snake like structure out of some lamps,
chains, and other city like materials, imagine the possibility with anything else.
It’s kind of amazing that this sculpture took approximately 5 to 6 items to make it
fully snake like. Mark Handforth made me feel creative because
of the way he thought of putting this sculpture together.
At first when I saw the structure I had a very hard time making out what it really was.
I thought it was just a bunch of things thrown together with no representation besides that
it was a bunch of materials used to build a building besides the lamppost.
After thoroughly observing it I realized how it coiled and the lamp ended up looking like
a head and I put the two together and came up that it had to be a snake.
When I finally took a look at the credit line I was correct.
To me this sculpture is a great work of art, because not only does it show a figure using
materials from different parts of a city, but it also expresses the artist’s passion
and creativity. When I take a look at Mark’s artwork it
makes me see other objects differently than what its true intention is supposed to be.
When I read the artist interpretation about the artwork, we kind of had the same thing
in mind. Some people have chain snakes on top of their
mailboxes, according to mark, and mark just wanted to create a bigger version of it using
materials from the city. Mark comments on the chain saying that the
chain becomes a snake because it’s something that it naturally shapes itself into.
He also comments on the light from the lamppost saying it never turns off.
At night it stays lit up and jokingly says it’s the starter light for Dallas.
When mark chose the color he didn’t use red but mostly the di suvero color.
He also notes that certain things you do to material that are inevitable, you just have
to do it. For example when you see a pipe, you bend
it. When you see a chain, you make it into a snake, and when you see a lamppost, you
twist it up. Mark’s one problem with art is knowing when
to stop. He notes that the hardest thing about creating
an artwork is when enough is enough. One thing that really caught onto me is when
Mark says “When you live in the world, you have got to just like take the world on and
just twist it to your means”. A quote like that makes me feel infinite,
as if anything is possible with just the objects around us.