For the purposes of this assignment, I attended the John B. Davis Gallery in spring of 2016. The title of the exhibition that I went to see was the “Undergraduate Art Exhibition and Scholarship Competition.” One of the artists displaying work in this exhibit was Cody Ingram and it was his work, titled “Digital Cauldron” that stood out to me the most. “Digital Cauldron” was done in oil on canvas, a two-dimensional representation of a nude woman dropping pixels into a cauldron done in surrealistic color. The work was not to scale, with the perspective originating from the base of the cauldron, looking over the lip to the woman beyond, a woman whose hair is made of cables and who has a lightbulb where her brain should be. As a result of the decision to use such a perspective, the cauldron was far larger than the woman was. If viewed to scale, the reverse would have been true. The piece is representational, attempting to offer up a representation of all of the pieces of data, the pixels, the information, that we freely drop into the digital cauldron that is the internet. The piece uses the juxtaposition of the cauldron with the digital, the old and the new, to try to present the symbiotic relationship that we are creating, as a society, between the two.
The work is proportionately correct, in light of the perspective adopted for the piece. The pixels get larger the closer they reach the bottom of the canvas, representing falling closer to the bottom of the cauldron, and the woman is appropriately proportioned. The focal point of the piece is the lip of the cauldron, highlighted from below to catch the eye. The work is balanced by the use of light and dark color and the appropriate use of perspective. The color scheme is a mixture of reds, greens, blues, purples, blacks, and yellows. The purpose of the piece is to show the interrelationship between the self and the digital world.