Opposites

In the art gallery on the first floor of Delta College’s S-wing stand two huge glass boxes on wheels. These boxes caught my eye the first time I saw them, but at the time I was in too much of a hurry to get a class and my curiosity was quelled. In one box there is a sculpture of two children playing with little white cubes. The cubes are stacked and placed randomly in the exhibit, and it looks like each one was made separately. It makes me wonder how heavy they are, since they stay in their positions despite the heavy traffic that goes through the art gallery. I also wonder if anyone has managed to jar any of the pieces from their original positions and if the positions they are in now are the ones they had been placed in.

Focusing back on the children, one is white (although darker than the blocks) and the other is black (as in the skin tone, not the actual color). The mottled coloration seems a bit fuzzy and reminds me of felt (my teacher assures me that it is felt in fact). Both children give the impression of being male, mostly because they are bald. They don’t have any kind of clothes on either. The black child is on his stomach, passively playing with the blocks, and I could picture him kicking his feet lazily. The white child seems opposite in more than color, since the position he's in suggests action. His body forms a triangle with the floor: butt in the air with noes and head on the ground, as if he was about to perform a somersault. How the white child could avoid the white blocks around him while doing such an action suggests a carelessness that would bring any respectable adult over to correct him before he harms himself.