My name is Margot. I am a senior at Stuyvesant High School, from Bayside, Queens. I found out about Youth Insights last year when I visited the Whitney Biennial 2012 exhibition with the Teen Advisory Board at the Noguchi Museum.
To me, art is a way to make sense of the world and to share ideas with others around me. I see art as a medium for social activism and as a medium for the development of self-identity. Some of my favorite artists include Georgia O’Keeffe for her use of color and blending, and Willie Doherty for the way he uses photography to bring awareness to historical events that he finds important. I am often inspired by the spaces around me. I love to find places where opposites coexist. I tend to use art to find greater insight into other areas of interest, which include history, math, and psychology. In college I hope to further this understanding by double majoring in either art history and economics or art history and psychology.
Margot’s Artwork
Margot
YI Artist, Fall 2012
Paper mache, gouache, wire, cardboard, wood, paper
With the help of Beth, I decided to represent the future in this project as an ambiguous three-dimensional shape. Using wire, I built the skeleton of the shape. I chose to leave a small part open to allow for a representation of the future, the present in the form of the wire, and the past behind it. While grappling with a major question I had about the future, I considered consulting a Magic 8 ball. However, I quickly realized that I trusted a toy to determine the future. Realizing this absurdity, I decided to use all of the responses that the Magic 8 ball can provide as the surface of my “future.” While it is incredibly tempting to believe that the future can be predicted, the only real predictors of the future are the trends from the past- i.e. history.
Margot
YI Artist, Fall 2012
Toy car, bottle, string lights, flameless candle, cardboard, wood, wire
For this project, I decided to cut one car and reposition it to represent a crash between two cars. My goal was to represent a car crash, a seemingly chaotic event, in an ordered manner. I filled the cut up bottle with pieces from the interior and exterior of the car to demonstrate this ordered manner. I incorporated lights in order to give the car a sense of motion and the close presence of man who caused this crash.
