Grades 5-8: Putting it in Perspective
Lesson Three
Artist Spotlight: Isidro Blasco
Provide your students with full-page images of the artist's work.
Click here for printable images.
Isidro Blasco combines architecture, photography and installation to explore themes of vision and perception in relation to physical experience. His work often references the realm of private or domestic space. Blasco normally begins by selecting one angle in a room or outdoors and then constructs a new space. The resulting effect is a fragmentation of a single line of sight. Blasco's three-dimensional sculptures result in elliptical successions of multiple angles, producing a space that is at once recognizable and entirely new.*
Student Connection: A 90-Degree Shift
Isidro Blasco begins by selecting one angle in a room or outdoor space. Working with a partner, choose a location in your classroom, yard, or home and position yourselves in the center of that space. Take a long piece of string, and have your partner hold one end while you hold the other end. One person should stand in the middle of the room, while the other walks forward until the string pulls tight. This is your established line of sight. Mark the end of this line, and then walk with the string to your right until you have made multiple new angles. Remember to mark each new point. After you have created these marked angles, make a list of everything that lies within the angles' line of sight. (e.g. Angle one: teacher's desk and part of the white board. Angle two: white board and doorway, etc.). Document each of these angles by taking a photograph from the position of your starting point, looking out at the various perspectives. Complete this lesson by creating your own sculpture or collage using your lists.
Student Connection: Explorative Writing About Interior Spaces
Writer Virginia Holman worked with teacher Cathy Fine's class of twenty-five fifth-graders in Durham, North Carolina for two weeks, visiting the class every day for an hour and a half. In this project the students wrote about their lives through the interior spaces they inhabited, particularly their homes. They talked about perspective, point of view, emotional perception, and the translation of words into images and vice versa. Photography and painting were also used as tools in the act of "seeing" their lives and feelings.
Click here to down load Holman + Fine's lesson plan.
*Artist information derived from: DC Contemporary
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