The Museum

In this work, I explore the relationship among social media, visitors, and the art museum gallery. In this comic story, a little squirrel performing as an avatar of an outsider identity walks into an art museum with a bunch of balloons that symbolize social media. The little squirrel engages the museum space by performing actions such as navigating the gallery space, climbing the stairs, and interacting with the artworks. This little squirrel embodies my perception of the museum experience and my attempt to make sense of social media’s capacity to disrupt cultural boundaries within the museum gallery. Carrying the social media balloons, the little squirrel is given agency to initiate a series of interactions with the cultural objects inside the museum galleries. While the carrying of balloons signifies being empowered with active agency, missing balloons suggests losing control, and the locating of the balloons represents coming to recognize an emergent relationship with the art museum.