Group Statement

Warsinske’s Wall Relief caused each of us to become inwardly reflective on how we think about the dynamics of the world. To us, this irregular spiral brought up questions of what-ifs involving time, discovering oneself, and society’s expectation of beauty. Overall, the Wall Relief uses its dynamic spiral to initiate meditation in one’s mind and to think more deeply about the world’s natural flow.

By: Emmalene Madsen, Ella Gambell, and Sophia LaPoint

I wanted to express how Warsinske’s Wall Relief made me become  introspective on the ideals of beauty in our society today. This acrylic painting has two sides, one gangly and violent that represents a darker side, and the other is bright and still in its intended form which represents the idealized side. I decided to take the original wall relief shape and unravel it as a way of demonstrating how idealized beauty unravels under close inspection. When I first saw the Wall Relief from afar it made me think of a rose, which a symbol commonly used for idealized beauty. However, as I got closer and inspected the sculpture, I found it was extremely rough and it seemed to have little reason to its shape. This feeling stuck with me, and made me think about how easy it is to idealize another person, but more often than not inside everyone has a selfish side to them that isn’t ideal. Even on the idealized side, there are red fingerprints that on one hand demonstrate a flower, but on the other hand also are an allusion to blood. Through my piece I wanted to showcase how there are always multiple sides to something, a yin and yang. -Emmalene Madsen (Admin)

Video Version

Warsinske’s Wall Relief sculpture represents to me the inward and outward expansion of the Self that college students experience during their education. In a sense, it is a hidden reminder for the students passing by to consciously grow and expand their knowledge during their years in university. A spiral will always expand inward while expanding outward, like young minds. Not only is it important to expand your branches further into the world, it is also crucial to self reflect and look inward to discover our true selves. For this piece, I created a portrait styled like Andy Warhol’s pop art in the 1960s, the same era when the Wall Relief was completed. The animation is creates a moving visual for the way I interpreted the sculpture. I placed the Wall Relief on the Third Eye, which is where Eastern mystics believe to be the home of our intuition. Additionally, the animation delineates the sensation of introspection through the practice of meditation.- Ella Gambell

Video Version

The reason why I made this video was to show how the sculpture reminds me of how time takes its course, and a rose, all in one. Wall Relief by Norman Warsinske makes me think of “Burnt Norton” by Lana Del Rey. The reason why it does this is because it reminds me of a time loop. How time is never ending, and it can sprout in many different ways. This song talks about time past, present, and future, and how everything that happened in the past is what causes what happens in the future. Whereas the sculpture is one big swirl/loop that only goes in one direction. The future is determined by the present, which is by the future, the past. The song suggests that “all time is eternally present”, which means there is no way we can change the course of the past, which is also the reason why “time is unredeemable”. The “perpetual possibility” is saying that our “what ifs?” will never become reality, because what has happened, has happened, and there is no way you can change that. The “sprouts” at the end represent how there could have been many different ways the past could’ve gone. The end of the song suggests that the passage ways that we did not take, and the doors that we never opened lead to a rose garden, which is only present in ones imagination, as the “what ifs” are a perpetual possibility that will never happen. The sculpture, at the end of the video, turns into a rose, as if all of time represents a flower that has over hundreds of different species. Which suggests that everyone’s life over time, is completely different. – Sophia LaPoint

Music credit – Burnt Norton (interlude) by Lana Del Rey