After nine years it’s finally over and they wrapped it up in a perfect, complete way. If you haven’t seen The Office’s finale episode by now, watch it IMMEDIATELY because there are spoilers below!
It was weird to come back to all our beloved characters a year later in this finale episode – just like it was weird when they started introducing the documentary we’ve watched all this time to the characters themselves. To them it’s a PBS documentary but to us it’s a comedy show, but the fact that they’re confronted with their old selves grounds the show in good heart, because they end up loving each other as much as we love them. It’s also a good excuse for this neat little wrap-up episode, so that after nine years of devoted watching we’re given a little closure.
Jim and Dwight’s newfound best friendship is the show’s solid foundation – the relationship we’ve seen most visibly since its beginning. The imbalance in Pam and Jim’s relationship makes it feel like we’re missing something, which would make sense since we can’t be in on all the romance, although maybe it is just that Pam’s too selfish and has to be asked point-blank for her to realize how much Jim has given up for her. I also think it’s really telling that the amount of time Jim needed for the Athlead tour was the same length that Pam took to go to art school in New York – three months.
The Q&A format gave us a behind-the-scenes look at these characters we’ve watched grow up for so long. Pam compares her relationship with Jim to a long book, it turns out Meredith was earning a PhD in child psychology and Erin meets both her parents after years of wondering. The Office recognized how important ordinary people can be, and it gives itself credit for this by making the documentary real for the characters too.
When someone asks what it was like to be filmed for so long, Dwight responds,
“With today’s modern surveillance technology, we’re in a constant state of being watched whether it’s our government or the government of other countries, AKA Google, you guys are being filmed way more than we ever were.”
After serving as manager twice already, he’s made the mistakes of firing a gun and painting his office black. He’s grown up into the best version of himself, keeping all the intense no-nonsense parts but adding the confidence to go after what he wants. Seeing the dramatic way he and Angela finally come out about their feelings for each other is the happiest series-ender we could wish for. And when Michael shows up with a “that’s what she said” to be the Bestist Mench just in the nick of time, everything is right in the world. He only has one other line in the whole episode but he’s happier than he’s ever been. When he watches Pam and Jim laughing across from Dwight and Angela, Michael leans back to the camera and says,
“I feel like all my kids grew up, and then they married each other. It’s every parent’s dream.”
Also Kelly running off with Ryan who leaves his baby to Nelly is just nuts. And I think we all kind of assumed Creed had a stash of the government’s LSD somewhere. The finale episode pays homage to the series as a whole, sticking to every crazy Shrute tradition and bringing back Carol and even the stripper from the Ben Franklin episode. After nine years in the same place, things are changing but they can only imply it’s for the better because we won’t get to watch.
A painter paints another painter in this picture, a man in blue holding a palette of colors. And since this is Picasso, it’s done in a style based off of his own. His figure is disjointed and geometricized, turned into shining cubes of color that hold pieces of a nose here and an ear there. It’s like looking at a realistic work by Picasso through an organized kaleidoscope.
Juan Gris was a Spanish painter and sculptor who met Picasso in France after moving to Paris in 1906. Gris regarded Picasso as a teacher, but Gertrude Stein wrote “Juan Gris was the only person whom Picasso wished away.”
These photographs were taken at the Art Institute in Chicago.
For more pictures of this museum’s work, see my Flickr album.
Tim O’Brien’s illustrations have been published in Rolling Stone, Newsweek, The New York Times and so many more – simple, conceptual images that resonate with audiences and stick a message in your brain. His personal pieces trade in celebrities and politicians for animals with bodies elegant and strong, and they persevere through hardships that make our stresses seem silly. There’s always a surreal aspect in his conceptual pieces but often they hide in subtleties, turning each illustration into a new game of “what in this picture is impossible?”
Tim is a professor at the University of Arts in Philadelphia and at the Pratt Institute in Brooklyn, and he’s lectured at The Norman Rockwell Museum, Rhode Island School of Design and the School of Visual Arts in New York City.
Ron Mueck’s new solo exhibition at Paris’ Fondation Cartier includes this incredible work where a man and a woman have been isolated from the rest of the world and are still happy about it after decades. Simply titled, “Couple Under An Umbrella,” it’s one of three new pieces in a show made up of bizarrely scaled sculptures that present people so real you wonder why they’re not breathing – hyperrealism in a contemplative way. My first impression is to relate the sculpture’s size to the person’s character or circumstance, and here the couple’s love is bigger than they are so their bodies follow suit.
“They seem to be frozen moments of life, each capturing the relationship between two human beings. The nature of their connection to each other is revealed by their actions, small, ordinary, yet intriguing. The precision of their gestures, the true to life rendering of their flesh, the suggestion of suppleness in their skin makes them seem completely real.
These works describe situations which are imaginary but their obsession with truth indicates an artist in search of perfection and with an acute sensitivity to form and material. By pushing likeness to its limits Ron Mueck creates works that are secret, meditative and mysterious.”
Ron Mueck’s solo exhibition at the Fondation Cartier in Paris in on view until September 29, 2013.
She goes by Zivabelle, and her designs and illustrations are gorgeous. So simple and clean, but always with something more to them that makes you look just a bit longer. These minimalist fashion illustrations play with black and white, visible and invisible, light and shadow. She got her bachelors in Visual Communication at Bezalel Academy of Design in Jerusalem, then headed to Barcelona to get a masters in Fashion at ELISAVA – Universitat Pompeu Fabra.
