2022 DP Visual Art Exhibition

DP

VISUAL ART EXHIBITION

Congratulations to the DP Visual Art class of 2022!

Inside this brochure are samples of the fabulous work created over the two year program and the students curatorial rationale which explains ideas and meaning.

With enduring gratitude, Ms. Melanie Dueck & the Grade 12 Artists

The exhibition may contains content that may be difficult for some viewers. Viewers discretion is advised.

ARTISTS

TABLE OF CONTENTS

claudia DAR 02: The Subconscious Mind

mialesjak 06: On The Eve.

jakobMA 10: An Everyday Normal

madison MAY 14: Headspace

sean Qian 18: Transmigration DP Visual Art Exhibition Tuesday, April 5, 2022 6:30 pm - 8:00 pm DP Building

01

The subconscious Mind Claudia Dar

02

Throughout my body of art, the idea of psychological experiences was explored. My art pieces are connected through a process of psychological experiences, specifically regarding mental health or self-reflecting.

The first two art pieces reflect on childhood motifs shown in ”Innocent Memories” and ”Take Her to the Moon for Me”, featuring recognizable movie characters or interpreted scenes. Specifically Innocent Memories link to the pink character in Insideout as it presents “core memories” of my childhood. These pieces were designed to incorporate psychological symbolism to compel the viewer to reminisce about their own childhood as well. The following pieces chosen have material significance, such as Arbitrarily Mistreated by using my own dog’s fur for the sculpture, 滅亡嘅 龍 (Perishing Dragon) with used hóngbāo (Chinese red envelopes) and chopsticks, or Concealed by incorporating old lego friends and barbie doll accessories from my childhood.

The last three pieces chosen portray the topic of mental health. Both the devil-like figure in ImAgInArY fRiEnD and the Pink figure from Take Her to the Moon for Me exist in one’s imagination; however, they have contradicting mindsets. The next piece shown is Vision Board which explores the topic of body dysmorphia, which is another psychological experience millions of people, specifically teenagers, may go through due to the unrealistic beauty or body standards relevant to today’s society. Lastly, Muted is a portrait of a woman’s face showing subtle emotion. This charcoal, graphite and eyeshadow powder portrait is the final piece of art as it represents how tired and

burnt out one can feel after all of these psychological experiences. Throughout this body of art, different perspectives on consciousness were explored. For example, reflecting on the past, overthinking, or individual thoughts occuring every day for many people. During the art-making process, I have expressed my feelings and emotions in a creative vision that also has sentimental value.

recollections. However, it may trigger the viewer’s brain to remember something similar to their past. Lastly, the compositions in ImAgInArY fRiEnD and Muted incorporate the figure facing the viewer as if it is making direct eye contact. The defined eyes in both art pieces may spark an emotion from the viewers of either feeling hesitant when gazing upon ImAgInArY fRiEnD or initiate the sensation of sympathy when facing Muted.

When displaying my art pieces, I have chosen a narrow hallway with all art pieces on one side of the wall, which allows the flow of ideas to appear more coherent.

This is because all psychological experience pieces explored reflect a time of my life, which guides the audience to interpret a story from start to finish. The sculptures have been placed on a podium at eye-level for the viewer to identify small details. In addition, the 2-D pieces were also presented at eye level to allow the flow of the psychological journey. The order of my art pieces, as mentioned above, was targeted to show the evolution of innocent childhood memories to begin to transform into mental health topics over time. The arrangement of the art pieces can also encompass the viewers to interpret some cognitive transformation.

As mentioned before, the arrangement of this body of art emphasizes the process of different psychological experiences one can go through. Individual mindsets and mentalities are constantly relevant issues that millions of people encounter within a lifetime. The different viewers’ opinions and psychological experiences affect their interpretation of various art pieces. The viewers can emotionally connect to specific pieces representing different topics such as reminiscing upon one’s childhood, feeling distant from one’s culture, being insecure about one’s appearance, or having anxiety or depression. Conversely, addressing and depicting these particular topics to viewers who have not gone through these experiences can be insightful as they are universal concepts in life.

The audience may connect with this body of art through various elements, compositions and topics. As mentioned before, material significance, such as molding the Chinese red envelopes as part of the sculpture in 滅亡嘅龍 (Perishing Dragon), can create a relationship with the audience as some materials can be recognizable. Elements in Innocent Memories may not display identical 03

Take Her to the Moon for Me Innocent Memories

Concealed 04

ImAgInArY fRiEnD

thE gallerY

Arbitrarily Mistreated

Vision Board

Perishing Dragon

Muted 05

My art exhibition explores the overall nature of modern society and illustrates my fears for our future. As I have grown up I have become more and more aware about the social and environmental issues occuring on a daily basis. These issues are things that I have always been inspired to take action on and do my best to raise awareness on these problems in hope for some change. In order to explore this theme in my works, I have been inspired by multiple artists from famous artists to everyday social media artists such as Simon Stålenhag, Pauline Zenk, and Yoann Lossel.

on the eve.

Mia Lesjak

The sub themes that I explore are widely spoken about world-wide and are meant to be issues that anyone can understand or connect to. Over the past several years, due to growing up in a very socially and politically involved family, I have always been updated on the daily world events and issues, specifically in the United States of America. As an American citizen and with most of my family there, hearing about shootings, racist Presidents, environmental protests, etc., I have come to realise that the destruction of humanity is, ultimately, being brought upon ourselves by nothing else but ourselves. While I usually utilise art as a tool to express my own fears and self-doubts, I thought it would be both interesting and valuable to try to utilise it as a tool to raise awareness on societal issues that are talked about, but rarely taken seriously in order to perhaps implant a mental consciousness of what is occurring around us.

My exhibition space was specifically chosen for its simple layout and two blank walls on either side of the room. Thus, this allows

06

for my pieces to be scattered on both walls, encasing the viewers in-between the crushing reality of where our world is going. On the left wall, I want my piece Train Station to be displayed across the span of the blank wall in large print. As it is natural for a viewer’s eyes to travel left to right, I want this piece to be the first to be seen as it seems quite plain and mundane compared to my other pieces. In addition, its length will also help direct the audience’s gaze around the room. Around this piece will be Open State Show and Tell and Baby Kylie as they, too, seem quite mundane and share the same sub themes of gun control.

However, what all three have in common are incredibly large shock factors and aim to raise questions in my viewers, thus putting them all together seems coherent. I utilised the implication of children in all three pieces in order to further strengthen the shock factor by juxtaposing innocence with danger.

While all the pieces are not directly tied together through overlapping topics, I wanted to be able to show a variety of social and environmental issues that are occurring from the extreme to more talked about. By setting the pieces up like this, I also provide viewers with a storyline and analysis of what I think: although there are many issues that slip by our consciousness on a daily basis, even extreme things, there is always a sense of hope for change and that we must ultimately acknowledge that there is change occurring––as explored in Delicate.

On the other side of the wall, nearest to the window, will be Untitled. I wanted this to be a greatly impactful shock factor for the viewers as they turn around and juxtapose with the life and nature that can be seen outside––the window that connects both sides of the walls. This piece explores the themes of death, greed and the male-gaze.

Similarly, on its right will be Inedible and Behold. Both pieces provide viewers a break from the extreme themes and imagery of the other pieces, while also exploring a similar theme of greed, overconsumption and perfectionism. Lastly will be the piece Delicate which aims to provide a small spark of hope in viewers through the vibrant colours and hopeful stare of the figure.

07

Open State Show and Tell Baby Kylie

Train Station 08

thE gallerY

Untitled

Behold

Inedible

Delicate 09

My exhibition represents the emotional and social pressures I experience on a daily basis and how I manage them. By going into detail in how the examples of social, family, and physical expectations affect me on a large scale, I have taken it onto myself to show how conformity makes me the way I am. To explore this concept I have taken inspiration from artists including Jean Michel Basquiat, George Condo, Sarah Eisenlohr, and Mary Lum.

An Everyday Normal

Emotional & Social Pressures Faced Throughout Life Jakob Ma

By focussing on the theme of pressure, I was able to approach it emotionally because of the social structures prevalent in my community. Growing up, I have always had a lot of expectations put on me. From being the eldest out of 12 cousins, the oldest brother and having parents with high aspirations, I do not know how to deal with the chaos of everything. Even though my parents are supportive and I have a close friend group, I still feel lost socially because I do not know what I want in my future and have never been able to explore my actual emotions with the people closest to me. By using art as a tool, I have been able to go into depth into these problems that other people can relate to and have highlighted the dark and bright spots in my life along the way.

In this exhibition, I wanted my sculpture, A Small World, to be in the middle of the room because it is a large scale piece where the audience could interact and view it from different angles. Along the walls I put the artworks with similar ideas next to each other. For example, Hand of God and Instaland because they explore the idea of our interaction with technology. The Ladder

10

of Life, The Body Transformed, and Living with the Apes are together because they deal with more social pressures and how conformity has affected my life. Having an empty room was also important because I want the room to feel lonely, dull and it puts emphasis on the pieces in the room.

My first two pieces, A Small World and The Body Transformed, explore themes of emotional pressures. A Small World depicts a gray environment which helps explore the idea of place and vulnerability and how it connects to human tragedy. The sculpture was made on a large scale purposefully to integrate the audience. The piece represents the looming idea of stress, judging our society’s every move and decisions we make. The bright strips of colour are used to represent people and their emotions in a community and how they are hidden beneath the grayness of life. The Body Transformed is inspired by Jean Michel Basquiat and his stylistic choices in the Neo Expressionism Era. By using large amounts of acrylic paint I was able to create a fullbody painting to communicate my ideas of the movement of emotions in our bodies and how external pressures impact them.

Using oil pastels on the face and white chalk for the words, I was able to integrate mixed media to create more depth and texture.

Showing the literal brown sludge that feels like it is flowing through me on bad days and using bright colours exploding from the core to show the happiness I try to exert.

pressures in our lives. Instaland explores the role of social media in the creation of social expectations and how people have worked around it to conform with everyone else’s values. The Hand of God shows the relationship of our addiction to technology and how it immerses people in their own world.

Overall, by sharing the emotional and social pressures in my life and how it relates to others, I am able to explore the vulnerability that I normally do not show in my life. Taking examples from my family, my friends and overall, the people around me, I go into depth with how it affects me.

My next pieces are Instaland and The Hand of God. They explore the relationship between people and technology, and how they have created unnecessary social 11

Instaland The Ladder of Life

The Hand of God

12

A Small World

thE gallerY

Living with the Apes

The Body Transformation

An Essential

13

Headspace Madison May

14

How we explore the patterns or recover from mental illness affects how we perceive the world around us. There are a multitude of different materials and techniques I have used when creating my artworks, all of which contribute to a large idea: recovering from mental illness. The issues covered in my art pieces are mental health and the importance of healthy coping. My intentions are to stress how important it is to work through mental illnesses and reflect on how they affect the body and mind, while also tracking the ever-changing improvements and downfalls that come with recovering.

as a result of trying to express my intrusive thoughts that come with OCD and how I imagine it looks. Hole in the Wall represents abandonment of industrialization and what happens when something old gets thrown away, resulting in nature taking over. Mother represents the greed and destruction of humanity––mirror to the nature of mental illnesses––and how mother nature can heal.

Sprawl represents cave systems and the complexity of nature itself, much like the complexity of mental health. Found You, represents how even if you’re recovering it can still get bad again.

My pieces reflect my mind at my worst, the fluctuating ups and downs of recovering from that difficulty, before finally finding myself where I was struggling before. The subject explored in my pieces is based on my own experiences with mental illness, specifically, obsessive-compulsive disorder (OCD). An artist I have taken inspiration from on multiple occasions has been Kim Dorland, an artist who uses multiple different mediums to create texture and vibrant colour in his pieces to evoke different emotions such as stress and anxiety. I have taken these techniques and applied them to my own work, resulting in all of my pieces including a wide range of texture, and occasionally vibrant colours are placed in the background of the painting in order to further encourage specific emotions.

I hope to create awareness about mental illness and how everybody has a different way of coping and recovering. I also was to stress that recovering from any sort of mental illness, addiction or any struggle, is difficult. Recovery is not an easy task and requires a huge amount of work. Thus, one cannot expect an immediate fix, but that’s okay.

My artwork is exhibited in the order of its creation. This shows the change in my mental state over two years. This allows the audience to see how the mind works and how mental illness recovery is not linear.

My first piece, Intrusive Forest, was created 15

Intrusive Forest

Mother 16

thE gallerY

Hole in the Wall

Found You

Sprawl 17

My art exhibition presents my experiences of moving to Canada from China as stories in each art piece. The inspiration for my art pieces stems from my feelings of selfdoubt, loneliness, homesickness, as well as neophobia. Topics that I felt uncomfortable expressing verbally to other people were easier to express through art. I have been inspired by artists such as Egon Schiele, Yue Minjun, and Liu Xiaodong, who all expressed themselves and their own experiences of their lives through their artworks.

应运而生 Transmigration Sean Qian

18

I was fortunate enough to have the opportunity to move from China to Vancouver at the age of 11. My parents thought that it would be great for me to go to school overseas. When I first arrived in Canada, unlike most people that move to a new country, it wasn’t that difficult for me to fit in and get used to a new lifestyle.

However, as time went on, I noticed that I began to slowly distance myself from my Chinese heritage back home. I have slowly started to forget how to speak my native language as I only speak it occasionally when I visit my homeland and being only able to visit my family and friends back in China during summer break didn’t help with that as well. Each time I went back to China, it was harder for me to keep a conversation with my family as my Mandarin was getting worse. It was also hard to find something in common with my friends in China due to the social differences. This made me feel lost and unclear about my identity and I didn’t know who I was as a person. This is best seen through Chasm, a self-portrait depicting my own struggles with the identity crisis by exploring physical expression and distorted body parts. The piece Semblance

depicts the environment of an abstracted Siheyuan, a historical type of residence that was commonly found throughout China, which my grandparents used to own and mainly encapsulates the feeling of the uncanniness of a familiar environment. What will be positioned towards the entrance of the exhibition, the piece Kalopsia, depicts my portrayal of meeting people when I first arrived in Canada, as I was initially scared to talk to new people, thus portraying them as this ghoul-like creature that I was scared to interact with.

be dark and will be lit up with dim lights onto the pieces, and the Siheyuan piece with candles within it, to guide the audience through the exhibition just like I did coming to Canada without knowing anything.

I hope that my audiences are able to understand the story I am trying to tell through this exhibition, one of coming to another country and my personal struggles with self-doubt, loneliness, and neophobia.

The starlight room was chosen as it is a room that is quite dark and has a curtain close to the wall to help make the room feel more like a corridor. The pieces will be presented from the oldest experience to the most recent: the older ones closer to the entrance and the most recent ones towards the back of the room. These artworks have been selected to be presented in this format as I want the audience to view my pieces chronologically and walk them through my struggles and experiences of coming to another country. Through this, I want to convey a story to the audience and put them inside my mind about how I felt while I was facing difficulties in my life.

As I want my exhibition to tell a complete narrative, I would like to connect the pieces in terms of composition as if a story is going on. For example, my self-portrait piece Chasm will be positioned in a way where it seems like it’s staring at Kalopsia, the ghoulish creatures, to tell a story about a younger me who was once scared of interacting and making new friends coming to Canada. To set the mood, the room will 19

Sonder Semblance

20

thE gallerY Kalopsia

Polarity

Blemish Chasm 21

2022 STAY CONNECTED www.stratfordhall.ca

@StratfordHallSchool

@Stratford_Hall

@Stratford_Hall

Stratford Hall | 3000 Commercial Drive, Vancouver, BC Canada V5N 4E2 | www.stratfordhall.ca