Author: Calvin Wang

Beasts of the Southern Wild is one of the more enigmatic films I have seen. Its hard not to fall for the cinematic beauty: the nature it is set in, the unbelievable power its main characters hold the camera with. Quvenzhané Wallis and Dwight Henry, who play Hushpuppy and Wink, were both amateur actors. Wallis … Continue reading The Lasting Ambiguity of Beasts

While looking through the pieces of art for class, I kept on returning to the architectural concept of Critical Regionalism popularized by Kenneth Frampton in the eighties. Critical Regionalism in architecture refers to a movement that counteracted both the modernist international style, and the postmodernist eccentricity in architecture. Frampton specifically places critical regionalism as a … Continue reading Critical Regionalism in Climate Change Art

I was really interested in the aesthetic choices made in the world building of Little Inferno, especially given the ending, where we are effectively brought into a whole new realm, one that perhaps had many cadences with the small furnace we face for most of the game. First, I was struck by the construction of … Continue reading Close Reading Little Inferno

In reading McGuire’s Here, I was constantly reminded of Christian Marclay’s 2010 video art piece, The Clock. Marclay’s work lasts 24 hours, and consists completely of scenes taken from old films where there is a timepiece—a clock of some sort—visible in the shot. The work is edited and shown so that when on view in a … Continue reading Space and Time in Marclay’s ‘The Clock’ and McGuire’s ‘Here’