Michelle Israel

Ciao again!

It's tourist season in Italy. It's kind of annoying trying to get around all of those tourists. So I decided to make that into an art project, of course! I went around the Ponte Vecchio and snapped photos of all of the things I wanted to see (mainly the jewelry shops). Except those damn tourists were always in the way, so I measured "How Many Tourists Does it Take to Block My View?" My photos ranged from 2 to 25 tourists blocking the things I wanted to see.

For my spectacle project, I took my "back pocket" idea of tourism and thought about all of the spectacles that tourists come to Italy to see: paintings, museums, sculptures, etc. So I decided to make myself into a spectacle; or more specifically, a sculpture. I painted my body white and wrapped sheets around me to make myself look like a sculpture in a museum. To make it more personal (i.e. bring more of myself into my project), my pose complements a story from my life. I plan on making a tiny display case featuring this anecdote (similar to how a sculpture would be displayed in a museum), and projecting a picture of myself as a sculpture life-size on a wall. Hopefully, this will create a "museum effect," in which I am the spectacle in the museum, the thing to be looked at.

That's all for this week - enjoy the photos!

Michelle