Presentation Type

Poster

Department

Art and Art History

Major

Art

Abstract

Art allows for the exploration of human life in a visual form. Over the summer I explored, through art, ideas regarding opposites and how they are more alike than we assume them to be. The purpose of this project was to reveal to the viewer that what we may think of as complete opposites actually achieve the same thing. The secondary purpose of this project was to explore these ideas in a non-representational form. I wanted to take this idea and present it through abstract art. I would observe two things that people seemed to think were opposites. I would then explore them with painting, searching for the link that combined them, that made them more alike than I or the audience would have imagined. X to Expression demonstrates my purpose in the most straightforward way of all my works. The background consists of vibrant colors of acrylic paint spread around in a random pattern. The foreground is a bold black X. The act of censoring something, of limiting what a person can say, makes just as big of a statement, if not a bigger one, than the statement that was silenced. The colors, the expression, swirl around the canvas and delight the eye. It is, however, the black X that dominates the viewer’s attention though. The X silences what has been expressed. This idea not only manifested itself politically in my body of work: it involved life and some of the more mundane aspects of life such as the chaos we get ourselves involved in. I was able to successfully demonstrate the similarities in opposites, all through the use of abstract art. The work is not direct in what it is saying but instead encourages the viewer to wrestle with it and the message it is conveying.

Faculty Mentor

Ty Pownall

Funding Source or Research Program

Summer Undergraduate Research Program

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X to Expression

Art allows for the exploration of human life in a visual form. Over the summer I explored, through art, ideas regarding opposites and how they are more alike than we assume them to be. The purpose of this project was to reveal to the viewer that what we may think of as complete opposites actually achieve the same thing. The secondary purpose of this project was to explore these ideas in a non-representational form. I wanted to take this idea and present it through abstract art. I would observe two things that people seemed to think were opposites. I would then explore them with painting, searching for the link that combined them, that made them more alike than I or the audience would have imagined. X to Expression demonstrates my purpose in the most straightforward way of all my works. The background consists of vibrant colors of acrylic paint spread around in a random pattern. The foreground is a bold black X. The act of censoring something, of limiting what a person can say, makes just as big of a statement, if not a bigger one, than the statement that was silenced. The colors, the expression, swirl around the canvas and delight the eye. It is, however, the black X that dominates the viewer’s attention though. The X silences what has been expressed. This idea not only manifested itself politically in my body of work: it involved life and some of the more mundane aspects of life such as the chaos we get ourselves involved in. I was able to successfully demonstrate the similarities in opposites, all through the use of abstract art. The work is not direct in what it is saying but instead encourages the viewer to wrestle with it and the message it is conveying.

 

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