As we gathered around our Visual Arts TRaC instructor, Anna Mecugni, in the gallery on the 5th floor of the Museum of Art and Design (the MAD Museum), I let my eyes wander around to take in all the crazy things in the gallery and I looked above me….

What was right on top of me made my eyes widen with awe. I didn’t realize it when I walked in, but this chandelier that was hanging on top of us was actually a piece of art!

Trinity, created by Andy Diaz Hope and Laurel Roth, is a chandelier decorated with strings of colorful pills and blood red drops of Swarovski crystals dripping out of the many needles. Each needle took the place of a giant crystal that would be on a normal chandelier. (For a moment, I felt as if the needles would drop onto our heads.) What struck me the most was the combination of swarovski crystals with hypothermic needles. It is such an odd, but beautiful, duo. The red crystals seemed to be dripping out of the needles as if they were blood. There was a large hypothermic needle almost completely filled with drops of red crystals.

I didn’t like the strings of colorful pills, I felt like it made the art look cheap. I know that it was part of their message, but I didn’t noticed them the first time I saw the chandelier, and I thought it was great, but when I did notice them, I realized that I liked the chandelier without the strings of pills. Besides the aesthetics of Trinity, I feel as if the art is asking us to reconsider how we use drugs and medicine. Maybe we should stop abusing them and think about who and how we affect others when we abuse drugs.