These were two very cool interactive pieces of art. The first was a panorama of Antarctica that you could walk inside and sit down in. I swear it was colder in there than it was in the rest of the museum! I had a chat with the museum guide and we couldn’t decide if it was psychological or a result of the air vents being relatively close to it.

The second was a room full of fake snow that you could actually walk around in, provided you took your shoes off first. It was dangerously slippery but a fun experience.

Emily is going to this event.

Perspectives 162: Snow features installation works by Los Angeles-based, conceptual artist Allie Bogle and Houston-based photographer Libbie Masterson. For this exhibition, both Bogle and Masterson have created immersive environments in which viewers are invited to either engage in playful interaction or quiet meditation. In their respective works, each artist speaks to landscape, but with a particular articulation that questions the viewer’s perception of what is natural and what is man-made. The subtext of their work points to larger social issues surrounding contemporary society’s disconnection from nature and its simultaneous desire to “recreate” the natural, even as it thaws into a spectacle of artificiality. A Perspectives-format catalogue accompanies this exhibition and features an essay written by curator Valerie Cassel Oliver, a checklist of featured works, and biographical and bibliographical information on the artists.

Emily is going to this event.

A leading artist of her generation, Taylor-Wood came to prominence in the mid-1990s as one of the YBA’s (Young British Artists), the British art movement that propelled artists like Damien Hirst and Tracey Emin to celebrity status for their provocative and sensational works. Taylor-Wood has since become renowned for deftly manipulating the signature media of our age—photography, film, and video—into compelling psychological portraits. The exhibition brings together an outstanding selection of 29 works from the mid-1990s to the present, including photographs as well as single-channel and projected film installation work.

Drawing freely from a variety of sources ranging from classic opera to Renaissance and Baroque painting to Hollywood, Taylor-Wood’s thought-provoking portraits and film work focus on the various states of human emotion. In her carefully staged work, her characters often grapple with mental and physical breaking points. The video Hysteria, 1997, portrays a woman’s tumultuous descent from a state of exhilaration to a palpable anguish. The poignant and beautifully rendered Crying Men, 2002-2004—a series of photographs that depict Hollywood leading men such as Laurence Fishburne, Ed Harris, and Benicio del Toro, among others, in moments of sorrow and introspection—also evokes the ambiguity of real emotion.

More recent works explore the artist’s fascination with suspended states—the sense of being caught in between two worlds. In David, 2004, Taylor-Wood photographs soccer icon David Beckham asleep, caught somewhere in the nether world of dreams. In the photographic series Self Portrait Suspended, 2004, Taylor-Wood appears utterly weightless and graceful as she is caught suspended in mid air in what appears to be a quest to reach a moment of “absolute release and freedom.”

Visiting the Lucy exhibit was something I very much wanted to accomplish before I left Houston. Lucy is the nickname of the most complete skeleton (about 40%) of an Australopithecus afarensis found to date. The skeleton is from about 3.2 million years ago and was discovered in 1974. They’re important because they answered a question that scientists had been debating for some time: did we start walking on two legs and then develop larger brains, or did we develop larger brains and then start walking on two legs? Turns out brain development came second.

I read an interesting article in Time that was somewhat critical of Lucy’s travels abroad. She’s barely been on display in Ethiopia over the last thirty years, and the Houston exhibit is the first time she’s left her home country. There’s a proposed five-year American tour for Lucy, but several museums have refused to show her on the grounds that she’ll be damaged in transit. (Despite the fact that she’s not quite as delicate as, say, the Dead Sea Scrolls, which were here in Houston less than four years ago.)

Houston might seem like a strange choice for her first stop, but it turns out we have a lot of connections to Ethiopia. Mickey Leland, the Texas congressman actually died in a plane crash on a mission to Ethiopia in 1989, and apparently he’s well known in the area because of this. Despite all our advantages, it still took six years to reach an arrangement with the Ethiopian government. She’s heading to Seattle next, and then who knows, but once she goes back to Ethiopia, it’s highly unlikely that they will give her up again.

Seeing Lucy up close was quite breathtaking. She was much smaller than I expected. The Time article mentioned that there isn’t the same emotional resonance viewing a replica as there is viewing the original bones, and I agree. They have a standing replica immediately behind her. It isn’t quite the same.

The rest of the exhibit didn’t interest me all that much. There were several rooms of things on loan from Ethiopian museums, but they seemed anachronistic. Most of the artifacts were from 1800 to 1900 and some were more recent than that. There were some videos that tried to give some context about Ethiopian history, but Lucy’s really the star of the show. Well worth the $15 ticket price, especially considering a lot of that money goes back to Ethiopian museums.

It’s quite a privilege to see Lucy, so if you get the opportunity, I suggest you take advantage of it.

He led his whole team to gold without breaking a sweat.

I think I’d have to marry him, too. He’s too cute.

He’s not technically on the team, he’s an alternate, but if you ask me, he was robbed at the Olympic trials.