Artists reflect on their pieces

Dalton Dockter: Shadow the main thing he felt like he struggled with was making the values of the shadows dark enough in the corners of the room. With Shadow, he didn’t have an idea in mind originally, he wanted to go for a spooky image. He created the room first, to get perspective, and then wondered how he could make the story of the picture spookier.

Aili Oliver: her eight-piece artwork. One of the pieces (the one with the holding hands in someone’s head) was, in her words “The longing of wanting to be in a relationship and feeling like you’re not anything without another person”. He next painting (the one with the house) she wanted to give the idea of, “not feeling home at home” further explaining that she grew up in SD but it never felt like her idea of what a home should be. The next painting (the one with the pills) she thought of the idea of she’s to codependent on her medication and that she could do anything without it, she made the person in it upside down to give the idea of “this is what I should be doing (i.e. taking the medication) but it doesn’t make me feel good”. Her next piece (stars for eyes) was about her feeling of “I have to have good grades in order to be a good person” and the meaning of worth when she’s in school is dependent of her grades.

Tae Swanson: L.I.C.E., which was her representation for the sin wrath. In this artwork she wanted to bring attention to the victims of mass school shooting because she believes that, when it comes to school shootings, they’re only focused on the people who did the act of violence and what the media could get from it afterwards. In this artwork it was made of real newspaper articles of the tragedies and the students last text messages. She thought of this idea when the school when, in the winter, the school had a blackout for a couple of hours and, like many others, she thought that something more sinister was at play and she wondered “Oh my god, am I about to be on the news” and based the artwork on that fear.