AP Studio Art 2016 Exhibition

 

Opening Reception Friday, May 27

Cornelius Wood Gallery

 

Featuring the work of AP Studio Art students:

Sam Cadigan ’16

Bea Crow ’16

Lily Henderson ’16

Sarah Ong ’16

Anna Pei ’16

Caroline Price ’16

Keki Takahara ’16

Sonia Tremblay ’16

Katie Waltman ’16

 

 

 

The central idea of my concentration is a study of interior space. I explore the mood and feeling a room or furniture can evoke even without people occupying it. Through the attention to light, color and form I hope to show the power a space has through its ability to bring up memories or emotion. Using oil paint as my medium I try to call attention to the temperature of the room. Finding the light sources, the shadows and highlights brings the rooms to life and further emphasizes a sense of nostalgia.In many of my paintings, the smooth brightness that lights the room is comforting. The furniture, chairs, and hallways that are empty have all been touched by humans and in some cases, as in the wear of the floor, this touch is evident and brings a strong personal feeling of nostalgia.

 

From ordering a thrifty quesadilla on a Friday night to satisfy a Mexican food craving, to sharing a homemade cake whipped up for a friend’s 18th birthday, to spending a placid Sunday morning in solitary contemplation while enjoying a waffle and blueberries, the consumption and creation of food functions as a defining component in my adolescence, and in all our lives. In each of my works, I aim not simply to capture the oftentimes pleasant aesthetics of the foods I have consumed, but to excavate and imply the implicit narratives underlying their preparation, presentation, and consumption.

 

Using the subject of Middlesex, my work explores the formal qualities of paint. As an artist who grew up making art primarily through pencil drawing, I find acrylic paint as a medium constantly astounding, incredibly evocative and emotional. As I explore paint, I use it as a mode through which I can explore color, line, form and shape; simultaneously, I explore my relationship to Middlesex in my last few days in my home for the past four years, and I often find myself exploring these abstract themes through an abstract approach, distorting colors and shapes to explore the underlying emotions of the everyday.

 

The central idea of my concentration is the omnipresence of organic forms in both nature and man-made objects.  In the modern era, where everything seems to be based on sleek lines and sharp edges, I still see natural forms in various places.  Although nature is the basis for our existence, there seems to be no focus or appreciation for it, only the desire to streamline everything, and I wanted to draw out the organic forms in my work.  Furthermore, I wanted to explore the relationship between the fashion industry, the second largest trade cause of pollution in the world, and nature – as fashion simultaneously celebrates and destroys nature at the same time.

 

Oftentimes we ignore the fact that nature is just as vulnerable as humans are, and this concentration attempts to elucidate that extreme crucial overlap. Flowers embody the same sense of fragility and nakedness that humans experience while exposed in both private and public spaces. Be it human emotion, or the fragility of a newly bloomed flower, both are at the mercy of nature’s power. While I am aware that flowers do not experience direct feelings, their extremely vulnerable existence is a perfect metaphor for how humans feel, for example, during puberty or sexual intimacy, and thus my concentration aims to use nature as a means of exploring the truth in the uncensored human condition.

 

The central idea of my concentration is exploration of societal perceptions and the portrayal of others. I seek to challenge the filter of convention that is so prevalent in the world, and urge viewers to see past the façade of flawlessness often surrounding the moments we choose to capture. I challenge the messages I find surrounding me in life through art, as in my piece exploring the distortion of media representation through collaged magazines, using varied styles of rendering to examine the effects of uncommon portrayals of well-known figures. Other aspects of my concentration call to mind society’s perception of the individual, as in the colored pencil iPhone camera rolls that offer viewers a narrow, biased window from which to observe a subject’s life.

 Sarah Ong ’16

I have been exploring movement with different types of line. Within my drawings, I explore line weight because I want to emphasize the anatomy of the human body and its movement. One of the reasons I wanted to delve into this idea is because humans can create a wide range of movement with their bodies without explicit thought. While most of my work began with pencil drawings, recently I have started using ink to portray motion with liquid and explosions. The texture of ink has allowed me to show the progress of my work, as the medium itself is very fluid. The composition of each piece challenges the viewer to not only consider the human body’s potential, but also to consider how the body occupies space.

 

My recent work has focused heavily on the environmental impact of consumerism. As population sizes swell at an alarming rate, the speed at which people, especially Americans, consume material things is even more appalling. With every update of an Apple product or “Fitbit” comes a wave of inorganic waste.  American Suburbia perfectly illustrates the lifestyle of the mindless consumer: row upon row of the same house with a myriad of trash bags out front, the perfect family with the newest clothes and the nicest car. Society focuses so much on appearance and being “current” that to cease updating itself is out of the question. The installation piece not only represents pollution, but the physical reaction the figure has while confronting, and projecting, their environmental impact.

 

My art is inspired by nature’s beauty and chaos, specifically, the details of the lines, spaces, and movements that organic forms are able to create. As I observe the environments around me, I’m always fascinated by the unique, organic shapes and textures that exist in our natural world. I’m drawn to the way different elements of nature connect and cross over as well as their ability to create subtle, but breathtaking settings. In this installation, I explore the energy and nuance that nature presents by creating a space where viewers can feel and experience what I see within my environments. The contrasts of light and dark, the different widths of lines, and the negative and positive spaces made with various media of string, acrylic paint, and micron pen come together to form a corner where my perspective of nature comes to life.