I woke up, uncharacteristically at 2.38 am this morning. After forty minutes of futile twisting and turning in the bed, I decided to wake up and complete the dimension sketches, or whatever they are called, (I am not yet familiar with the semantics of interior designing) for the renovations at our apartment in India. I was already five days late in sending them to my very anxious mother.
To better focus my meandering mind, I decided to go to the breathlessly silent Norris Medical Library at the USC Health Sciences Campus. All of the art decorating the inconspicuous ground floor, comprises of large photographs in grayscale. Some of these are photographs of ruins in wilderness, while many others are those of houses of low income groups or underprivileged people.
While I have been seeing these photographs and finding myself wondering about them at the back of my mind for two semesters now, I have never spent more than 15 seconds to take the the time to process my thoughts until now. I wonder if I stopped to think about them because I was working on something somewhat artsy myself or was discussing a different form of art with a friend. I realised, that every single one of these photographs, had a story to tell but without a caption or a description of any sort, I was left painfully curious.
The ruins show pictures of buildings made of large cuboidal rocks, staircases, arches, and high pillars. Given that I am in California, my first thoughts on location are of California or the US. But the very next thought refutes the possibility. Its hard to tell how old these ruins must be, and the grayscale makes them look older than they probably are, but I wonder if the Indians built places as magnificent as these ruins must have been in all their glory.
On one side of the lower floor, there are photographs of dilapidated houses, constructed rather poorly of both brick & mortar and wood, with large chunks of mortar and paint chipping off. Narrow dirt roads separate two snake-like rows of three story houses. A shallow stream of what appears to be drain water is coming out of each house and merging along the way. Wheat skinned children seem to be playing or simply walking along the shaded dirt road, completely unaffected and unconcerned that one of the protruding upper story of a house may fall upon them anytime. There is a women, with her head and face covered in a white dupatta, standing in a doorway looking in the direction of the children.
Once again, I am anxious to know what city or village these photographs were taken and what became of these streets, those houses. Would they still be there, the same, unchanged like the photograph or if a war destroyed them?
Suddenly, I was reminded of the colourful photographs of beautiful, breathtaking landscapes, encased in rather large frames, decorating the walls of Keck Hospital Cardinal lobby. Several of these are of national parks of the United States. Wandering around some of the corridors on the first floor, one would find colourful patchwork art of landscapes, and large photographs of the University Park Campus shaded in sepia.
I wonder if the art decorators had a particular motive behind their choice. A hospital is where gloomy people seek hope of a better health (for themselves or for their loved ones). The pictures of sunny landscape contrast the mood of the air of a hospital lobby. It serves to distract people in pain by giving them something calm and serene to look at while they wait.
A library is a place to grow in knowledge, develop ideas and apply learning. They a places where tomorrow is being shaped. Therefore, it makes sense for art in such a temple to be thought provoking. The art in Norris Medical Library lower floor is probably there to serve as reminder of how far we have come from the denizens of the ruins, and how much further we need to go to achieve equality in access to resources for all.
