Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway at the Burke
10 Jan 2010 Leave a Comment
in Art, Burke Museum, Museums, Seattle Tags: dinosaurs, fossils, Kirk Johnson, Ray Troll, Royal Tyrrell Museum
I finally got to check out the Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway exhibit at the Burke Museum on Thursday night. Fossils and Ray Troll’s artwork – you have to check this out if live in or are coming to Seattle by May 31, and with free First Thursdays, even if you’re broke, there’s no excuse.
Cruisin’ the fossil freeway, by Ray Troll. On view in Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway, December 19, 2009 – May 3, 2010, Burke Museum, Seattle.
The Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway exhibit combines Ray Troll’s artwork with some of the fossils that inspired them, giving a sometimes whimsical look at what they’d look like if they were still roving around.
Ray talks about his artistic process in the video below:
Ray Troll collaborated with paleontologist Kirk Johnson in creating the exhibit and the book by the same title that preceded it. According to the exhibit’s website, the dynamic duo took “5,000-mile road trip through the American West . . . to explore the fossil record.”
Here they are hunting for fossils on the Olympic peninsula in Washington state:
One of the things that really struck me from the exhibit was that these fossils are all around us, often buried in ever deeper layers going back millions of years; of all these animals that once were wandering around like we are amidst plants now long gone as well.
I checked out the rest of the museum as well, including the ongoing Life and Times of Washington State, more fossils and reconstructions of dinosaurs and other species long gone. Even the 10,000 year old mastodon is quite ancient, then there’s a 28 million year old whale (hopefully we won’t make them extinct in our lifetime), and a 140 million year old allosaurus. Wow, that really makes you think how short our time on earth is.
For some reason I was really drawn to the dinosaurs and especially the elasmosaur, a sea creature that must be the inspiration (or maybe grandsire of) the Loch Ness monster.
Here’s a video about a elasmosaur found in Canada from the Royal Tyrrell Museum in Alberta:
There’s a photo of the Burke’s elasmosaur on their blog entry:
http://burkemuseum.blogspot.com/2008/02/i-see-your-fish-lizard-and-raise-you.html
Love the periscope looking out at it! I didn’t notice the periscope when I was walking along on the other side, but saw it moving while I was looking at Nessie, er the elasmosaur. . .
Dinosaur highway, by Ray Troll. On view in Cruisin’ the Fossil Freeway, December 19, 2009 – May 3, 2010, Burke Museum, Seattle.
Check out the Cruisin’ the Fossil Highway exhibit while you can at the Burke through the end of May. According to the website, it will be traveling nationally after that, maybe cruisin’ to a museum near you!
Links:
Burke Museum: http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/
Cruisin’ the Fossil Highway: http://www.washington.edu/burkemuseum/cruisin/
Ray Toll: http://www.trollart.com/
Ray Troll t-shirts, pins, refrigerator magnets, etc. also available at the Burke. I may have gotten in for free, but I couldn’t resist buying a refrigerator magnet in the design of the first picture on top. No doubt I’ll be back!
The Power of One: Photography & Activism
31 Aug 2008 Leave a Comment
in Amnesty International, Art, Bumbershoot, Human Rights, Iraq War, Photography, Seattle Tags: Benham Gallery, Bumbershoot, globalization, Jackie Renn, Katharina Mourtidi, Nina Berman, Phil Borges, The Power of One
So, I made it up to the Benham Gallery’s The Power of One photography exhibit our local Amnesty International group is involved with in the Northwest Rooms of Seattle Center on Friday night, for an early look before it’s run as part of Bumpershoot. It was an inspiring, and at times heart wrenching, display.
Included were photos from Phil Borges latest book, Women Empowered: Inspiring Change in the Emerging World. Borges partnered with CARE “to bring attention to the necessity of empowering women in the global campaign to alleviate poverty.” He profiled courageous women, including a teacher who continued teaching girls in secret in Afghanistan during the Taliban rule; a young woman from Ethiopia who not only refused female circumcision herself, but ended it in her community by video taping a circumcision and showing it to the male leaders who had never actually seen the procedure at the time and were horrified, voting 15 to 2 a couple weeks later to end female circumcision in their village; and a woman from Bangladesh sold into a brothel by her aunt at age 13, fighting for the rights of her fellow sex workers.
Jackie Renn’s exhibit, Portraits of Conscience: Celebrating the First Amendment During a Time of War 2002–2007 included both photos of Seattle’s protests of our current war and video interviews of conscientious objectors from WW II to the Iraq War.
Nina Berman’s photos, Purple Hearts: Back from Iraq & Marine’s Wedding were very compelling and disturbing. All photos of young men (and at least one woman) who served in our military and came back from the Iraq severely injured, some with faces disfigured, others missing limbs. We hear all about the “surge” and how the war in Iraq is all right again now from the Republicans, but at what cost, even to our own soldiers?
The photos of the Marine’s wedding, in a separate alcove (with a video of soldiers/veterans talking about the war) were especially haunting, with a wedding photo of the disfigured groom and his scared bride. I picked up a flyer that told how former Marine Sgt. Ty Ziegel had been seriously injured in by a suicide car bomber in 2004 in Iraq and how his family and his fiancee Renee Kline supported him during his recovery. They asked anyone who wants to help to send donations to Fisher House, an organization which aids military families including Ty’s.
I saw a couple of Katharina Mouratidi’s photos, The Other Globalisation inside at the entrance to the main exhibit in the Olympic room. When I left (or thought I had left) the Power of One exhibit, I discovered there were a lot more of the globalization photos outside, at the other end of the Northwest Rooms (and that people are likely to be seeing a lot just roaming around Bumpershoot between music). Mouratidi has photographed those fighting for the rights of people and the planet against the corporate dominated, “race to the bottom” globalization, including photos of people like Rigoberta Menchú , José Bové and others not so famous.
An amazing exhibit. As the card at the entrance noted: “Power of One was created to inspire and empower our inner-hero” (emphasis from original).
Here locally in Seattle, our next Amnesty International meeting is coming up Tuesday, September 2 (6:30pm at the Mosaic Coffee House). Our featured speaker will be Kathleen Morris of the Washington Anti-Trafficking Response Network and the Anti-Trafficking Program Manager at the International Rescue Committee.
More information on our meeting, including directions to the Mosaic at:
http://www.scn.org/amnesty/current.html
If you don’t live in Seattle, consider finding a local or student group near you or taking action online at either Amnesty International or Amnesty International USA (or your country’s section). I’ve also included an rss feed of AI’s most recent Urgent Actions right beneath the calendar on the left of this blog, as well as a feed for the most recent AI press releases.
Or consider one of the multitude of other activist or humanitarian groups, even if all you have time or money to do is write a suggested letter or e-mail action online every now and then or donate a few dollars. It all adds up. You do have the power.
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