Art Review: William Kentridge's The Refusal of Time

William Kentridge's The Refusal of Time is an installation in the Metropolitan Museum in New York.
The exhibition is absolutely brilliant.
There are five projections set up, each depicting a different time or a traveling through time.
Each video is filmed in black and white, and there are different scenes.
William Kentridge himself is shown climbing up chairs and coming back down in what seems to never end. The projections change up and different characters are added and different scenes are displayed. There is also a huge structure that is moving back and forth while what appears to be a metronome ticks away.

Metronome on structure ticks away

The exhibition was visually pleasing and the background music (especially the tuba) gave a lot of life to the videos. The people used in the videos were animated and colorful even though they were shot in black and white. I really enjoyed the energy of this exhibition and a lot of the dancing scenes reminded me of dancing back home in Nigeria.

Time Fictional Documentary: The Real Life of an Art Student

Creating a fictional documentary is challenging because to create a video investigation that is unreal, there needs to be a lot of improvisation and creativity.
My partner, Ishita Mehta and I created a fictional documentary focusing on the real life of an art student. We showed three students "working" on their projects that they had created, not just doing what art students are stereotypically thought to always do: drawing.
Looking back at this video, I wish my partner and I had actually done the opposite: shown an art student as what people think he or she is. That would have made the video seem more fictional.
I also wish we had used better transitions and more footage, and that we had tied up the ending better, instead of letting it end abruptly on a note.

Final Project: Linear Time Graphic Novel

I wanted to explore and express linear time using subway trains. The trains start from their first stop, which one could say is the beginning, and travel down all the way to their last stop. What's interesting is that even after a train has reached its last stop, it reverses and goes back to its starting point and keeps going on in that manner.

I developed a fictional character whose interactions (or lack thereof) with other people on the train imitate the way the train travels. She is a girl who is wanting to interact with someone on the train who is similar to who she is, but doesn't realize as she gets off at the last stop, that there is always someone exactly like her and the process continues.

I was inspired a little bit by Steve McCloud's transitions and I looked at work from Art Spiegelman to see how they created their graphic novels.

If I could go back, I would definitely keep up with the consistency of the yellow panels to signal the train announcements, as well as clean up a bit of the drawing blurs.