9:50 a.m.

Love is blind, and that is why I've seen It's Complicated more than once. The slew of life-style driven product placements, shiny Priuses and close-up shots of glossy highlights/laughter/bottles of wine wanders beyond too much to bear. But! it's a movie, and not reality anyway.

However, as much as I adore Meryl Streep and many rom-coms, I am perplexed by the scene in which her character, Jane, and Alec Baldwin's character fight, kiss and make-up around a water-cooler in her kitchen. Do you know what I'm talking about? Jane has already graciously made a Pellegrino (more lifestyle-driven product placements) and orange juice for Jake. Then, in mid-conversation, Jane strides over to her strategically placed, office-sized Arrowhead water cooler and begins to fill up a glass. This is supposed to feel natural. Instead, I try to think of someone I know, of any socio-economic-bottled-water-loving attitude, who owns a water cooler like this. Still in mid-conversation with Jake, she realizes the water cooler is empty. She grabs a new one, from some secret lair of water coolers, and we watch as she removes the now-obsolete container and replaces it with the new one. Knowing firsthand that water coolers are tricky, I anxiously wonder if she will drop the container, and it will burst all over the floor. Throughout all of this, Jane and Jake partake in a light-hearted banter.

What is the meaning of this scene? What if Jane had poured herself a fizzy orange juice too, and they playfully argued in the garden or at the sweeping stone-topped kitchen island? For me, it would have been less distracting than the giant water cooler action in the corner.

Further, does this scene develop Jane's character? Do we now learn that Jane not only possesses the world's most beautiful kitchen (complete with glass cake stands and covers) but can also multitask at the water cooler?

Most important, what producer owed Arrowhead a favor so big it required a distractingly long and contrived domestic water cooler scene had to come from it?

12:42 a.m.

Children have an uncanny ability to transform fleeting moments into unbelievably exaggerated lengths of time. Strangely, these elongated lapses remain embedded in our memories, even into the logical realm of adulthood. I vividly remember being dragged by mother through the old contemporary wing of the Nelson-Atkins Museum on weekends and afternoons. As a six or seven-year old, I think I dealt well regarding the number of museum visits I made. With the zoned-out valiance of an easily amused child, I wandered around and waited for her, my mother, an artist, who should have lived during the New York School, and whose abstract paintings would, sadly, never outsell the garish barn watercolors in the local galleries of Parkville. As long as we visited the corridor of recreated period-style rooms before leaving the museum, I was okay with sitting on any black, leather bench and staring off into space. One afternoon, I found myself staring into a dark, square void of a painting and thinking in child-appropriate terms, "What the hell is this?"

"This" was Untitled No. 11 — a Mark Rothko.

Nothing in my minor existence had prepared me for a painting like No. 11. Although I grew up around art, adored papier mache and huffed new boxes of Crayola crayons, my experience with Rothko was a full-fledged mind-blower. In retrospect, viewing the Rothko was the first of only a handful of recondite moments I have had in my life. I was enveloped by the nearly-black brown and carried into what I can only describe as a dark-lightness. I do not recall any breakthrough thoughts related to the painting or art in general, but I do know that I couldn't stop thinking about it, even in the recreated period-style rooms, and even after we left. On return visits, I was only interested in going back to the black leather bench and getting sucked back into Rothko's world.

For something so abstract, I wasn't intimidated by Untitled No. 11. If anything, it was easy and strangely inviting to me; somehow unpretentious, I remember thinking that the painting itself wasn't trying too hard or suggesting a particular point of view. Kids like that.*

Rothko's work moves without moving, and that's what I love about it. With each visit, each viewing, it is impossible to see the work in the same way. Brooding colors play games with whatever personal mood you bring into the gallery. The longer you look, the more you are drawn into the slow, deliberate flux within the canvas.

Untitled No. 11 stuck with me, but I didn't get sucked back in until 15 years later, when I was in a room filled with his works at the Tate Modern. If a person can have an experience like mine as a child with one of his paintings, being surrounded by eight, large works was overwhelming. "This afternoon, I am sitting in a room filled with Rothko's," I wrote in a journal entry from the day. "My stomach churns like the paintings, and my head has filled with thick syrup that moves with what I see before me."

One year later, I was back again. Only now, I walked through rooms filled with Rothko's color field paintings for the Tate Modern's retrospective on the artist. Maybe it was because I was not sitting while viewing most of the works, or perhaps the constant stream of viewers left me distracted, but my experience was more grounded this time. I was moved by the series, and for transient moments I was drawn into certain canvases, but never in that syrupy way.

Certain smells, imagery and foods conjure memories of childhood. A friend told me that just thinking about the cinnamon rolls her grandmother once made nearly brings her to tears. My association with Mark Rothko evokes memories of inscrutable moments — memories of inexplicable, personal growth and imagination. Although I cannot remember my thoughts while viewing his works (journal entries help), I can recall the feelings afterward because they have remained with me, especially Untitled No. 11.

* Rothko began writing a book he never finished that compared the work of modern painters with children's art.

2:54 p.m.

As if our financial state wasn't a big enough joke already, let's take a moment to reflect on the tragically confusing, colorplosion of the new Benjamin. I'm counting...seven different typefaces? Can anyone confirm? Is it even possible?

10:45 a.m.

Making a vector Earth card was the least I could do for such a special lady!

9:46 p.m.

Potions of Our Own Perception

It's Elementary My Dear Watson, an exhibition by Ian Shelly

Exciting photos to come!

"Holy Shit," exclaimed a surprised, twenty-something as she entered the George Caleb Bingham Gallery. "Now this is a grad show."

Despite her uninhibited use of an expletive, the woman's reaction is quite appropriate for ceramicist Ian Shelly's Masters Thesis exhibition. It's Elementary My Dear Watson is a successful and complex study on where, among other things, childlike naiveté and scientific rationalism converge. Excited playground shrieks rub together with scientific discovery in an atomic particle party of Eureka! moments.

Shelly has transformed the gallery into a space full of sculptural vignettes that are tied together not only by subject matter, but also by a distinctive language of color, geometrics and mechanics. The cone is used throughout his sculptures, and Shelly constantly challenges its meaning as a "beneficial or detrimental" symbol. Clay, cone-shaped, pseudo-humans are the protagonists of each work, peering collectively through scientific lenses, or wobbling alone at a miniature, handmade telescope. Large canvases adorn either end of the gallery, with more cone-beings hanging from miniature, metal swing stages, perhaps serving as window washers or painters. Recalling past science lessons, they seem to paint or rinse away sketches of abstract atoms.

In another imagined world, a canvas with the faintest hint of Mondrian is violated by multicolored cone-shaped bullets that penetrate and pop out like growths, suggesting the juxtaposition of humanity and weaponry. Painted in slightly dirty yellows, oranges, reds and blues, crumpled traffic cones serve as drunken guides through many of Shelly's other works.

Situated in the center of the gallery and serving as the exhibition's climax, a post-apocalyptic sand castle crumbles before us — either washed away by a natural source or our own doing. And still, there is a naiveté and whimsy to it all. Shelly is a skilled illusionist, as his nearly real fortress evokes our own childhood pipe-dreams and playthings. Maybe it is simply a little boy's imagined playhouse. With his range of techniques, it is quite possible to forget that Shelly's primary medium is clay, a natural substance that is always somewhere under our feet. Here, miniature wooden tanks infiltrate the barriers of trompe-l'œil clay that imitates wood or rusty, aged metal.

The exhibition inspires valuable discourse on the perception of our own activities. At what point does a plaything represent a perpetrator? As if left out from their toy-box, there are disheveled toys off in a corner — a reinvention of Risk where there are no continents to conquer, only soldiers to corner and destroy. Across the room, five jets hang statically between the floor and ceiling. Four resemble military aircraft. One, however, looks like a tiny, model plane invented by the Wright brothers. By questioning our memory of childhood, perception of objects and thoughts on our own history, Shelly taunts us to play "Which of these things is not like the other?"

Down to every detail, It's Elementary My Dear Watson is an exquisite show that examines and challenges our notions of humanity's flippancy and fragility against undisputed scientific evidence. Although there are only a few moments when the exhibition can seem too literal, the artist's vision and execution of his show is both complex and complete, with plenty of opportunities for discovery along the way.

It's Elementary My Dear Watson exhibits April 19th-29th at the George Caleb Bingham Gallery, with an opening reception on April 23rd and a lecture on April 28th.

For more information, visit ianshelly.com or the Bingham Gallery's website.

10:17 p.m.

Venice, through the Looking Glass

Thoughts on 3. Visions in Glass, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

From Left: Laura de Santillana, Christiano Bianchin, Yoichi Ohira

Photos via Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art

I couldn't go to England because of a big, loud volcano that Jon Stewart named Kevin. I went to see Venice instead, at the Nelson-Atkins Museum of Art.

Venice. 3 Visions in Glass is the first stop on a tour of three cities (Kansas City, Naples and Paris), that illuminates the Venetian side of life, showing the diverse work of a trio of glass artists, all of whom work on the island of Murano.

I've always had a difficult time thinking critically about sculpture (although, you'd think with a design background, sculpture might be a more comfortable place for me to think about art), but in the past few months, I've enjoyed the challenges that come with experiencing an unfamiliar media, asking stupid questions and diving right in to find out what I really think.

I had never thought about seeing a city through glass. Although you could take a stained-glass window tour of the entire country of Italy, I didn't initially believe that contemporary glass sculpture could emotionally place me in present-day Capulet-Montague territory. This group exhibition changed my mind.

I was first drawn to the minimalist slab works of Laura de Santillana. There is a two-yet-three-dimensional quality to her work, and the color field style is reminiscent of a Mark Rothko or Morris Lewis painting. But thank goodness it isn't a painting; the color and the frostiness of the glass work together in different lighting to exude a certain moodiness. Her slabs are inspired by pieces of glass found on the shore that have been worked away by the sea. Dark grays, charcoals and ambers give off an earthy glow. And then, washes and splashes of Merlot and Kryptonite green are stretched through a series called Flags, which creates even more opportunities for variations in light and reflection. Although the colors alone draw one into her work, the complexity of a seemingly simple slab is what ignites the hues. Moments and sips of air are trapped within glass confines — as if there is a gap between two window panes — forming small pockets of liveliness that evoke large, flat bubbles from deep in the sea.

But Santillana doesn't stop with the slabs. She also makes bright, large, metallic vessels that do not look like glass at all. In a way, they resemble oversized, crunched-up water bottles strewn along the shore. Overall, the artist's use of surprising color — tangerine, sparkling amethyst, ultramarine — produces an ethereal quality to the everyday objects that happened to provide inspiration.

Christiano Bianchin's glass sculptures work well when placed in the room with Santillana's. Like Santillana's slabs, there is a mid-Century modern quality to Bianchin's sleek shapes, partly covered in intricately crocheted hemp, which immediately transport us to the coast, where fishermen pull in their nets. There is a seriousness to both Bianchin's opaque and transparent pieces, but flea-market trinkets adorn the tops of urns, adding a humor to his work, hinting again at the sea's endless surprises of contextless objects washed ashore.

Bianchin's sculptures do not necessarily stir up a particular emotion; rather, they evoke imaginings of Venetian history. A series of polished, oblong vessels resemble modern-day interpretations of ancient effigies or tools. Although they are clearly works of art, Bianchin's pieces imbue an intentional practicality — perhaps in another life they stored one's jewelry, sweets or stones from the seaside.

And then, Japanese-born Yoichi Ohira takes viewers spiraling down a rabbit hole of both dazzling, kaleidescopes of color and extreme absences of everything but clear glass. In his imaginative and meticulous-yet-chaotically colorful series Calle, Ohira presents vibrant works that open, like Venetian canals, into another world of psychedelic, super saturated, color. Fleeting moments of narrow, sunlight-ridden streets amble into loose-yet-intentional patterns and layers. But then, he eliminates everything. All color is stripped from other works save for the painted red lip of a vase's top. It's as if we've made an accidental but lucky turn down a side alley to see something so abruptly different. Even with the extremely minimalist glassworks, one can clearly see Ohira's artistic range and dynamism within the pockets and layers he has created in the vessels. With or without color, Ohira's works kinetically dance to "music without sound."

Venice: 3 Visions in Glass is not lacking in pieces to see. In fact, the amount of glasswork was slightly overwhelming. Because the Nelson does not yet have a permanent glass collection, it is understandable that the museum would want to take advantage of the opportunity to show as much work as possible. Still, a higher level of selectivity could have tied the artists together more effectively. Although most of Santillana's works are shown with Bianchin's, Yoichi Ohira's pieces are cornered in cases out of the central exhibit (I found myself doing an excessive amount of walking back and forth between Santillana and Ohira). Integrating the three artists would enable viewers to develop stronger exhibition narratives and fully appreciate the simultaneous diversity and mutual experiences of the artists and their work.

9:32 p.m.

Whoa. Get ready.

Organic vanilla yogurt, halved almonds and the crown — a few chopped pieces of Green & Blacks 70% Dark Chocolate.