Artists

Spring 2022

With Alejandro Morales

NYC iSchool
Peace of Mind

The purpose of my art is to expand my view of the world. There are moments when we feel like we are the only person existing, and these paintings show that from the outside. Figurative paintings are so interesting to me because they can tell a story about someone.  I wanted to see how far the meaning goes when the figure isn't given the most color or attention. I also wanted to experiment with different mediums that might not usually be used together. The mediums I used are watercolors and oil pastels. The watercolor was used to paint the figure itself, and the background. The oil pastels were to add smaller details and make the pieces more dynamic.

Hunter College High School
Over Here

Ever since I started to make art, I have wondered what the point of my art was. I generally sketch for fun, and I use sketching and art to express my own emotions. However, I do so without trying to discuss something with or stand out to my audience. Over here explores the idea of being hidden and presents two alternate realities of being heard and being invisible. As I created this collage, the medium I chose shifted multiple times until I settled on the idea of a collage as it highlights the patchwork pieces that we are surrounded by. While creating this piece, I was pushed outside of my comfort zone, as I generally don’t create collages, and I was forced to think about which reality I wanted my art to exist in.

High School of Art and Design
An Overwhelming Feeling

Expressing the feelings of anxiety and being overwhelmed by the events of everyday life, I have worked to express that feeling through the use of a self portrait rendered in black and white that is directly contrasting with the colorful background to emphasize that despite our seemingly normal life we are all faced with an overbearing amount of anxiety. The words against the darker center of the piece overlapping the portrait represent the societal and personal worries shared among the larger population as a whole especially with the ever changing world we live in whether it be from new innovations to reverting back to past customs.

Fiorello H. LaGuardia High School of Music & Art and Performing Arts
Stress Becomes a Cast 

I was working with a new material, moldable plastic. After dipping it in boiling water to warm it up, I began to shape it against my palms, twisting it around my fingers. This was a pleasant experience at first, as I felt the warm cushion against my hand. But as the plastic began to cool down, it hardened and a panic surged through me. The plastic had formed a cast around my hand, restricting all movement. Simultaneously, memories flooded back to me of times in my life when stress had made simple tasks feel impossible. My photography utilizes this plastic hand cast to depict the physical restrictions that come when stress overwhelms you and the impact this has on your ability to live your everyday life.

Notre Dame
Distressed Mountains 

I am trying to convey my everyday thoughts and feelings to a work people can see. I hope that looking at this you can resonate with it in any way you can. The main idea of this work is to show my frustrations and stress, and how it affects me, and what it causes (mainly inspired by my hair pulling).  I feel that oftentimes people think they are alone in their feelings, and that no one goes through the same things and bad habits, which is simply not true. We are all people who relate more to each other than we give credit for. This was made on canvas with acrylic, clay, hair extensions.

NYC iSchool
Muse of the Mystic

In a fast paced world of media, public actions, social interactions, and the normality of suppressing our emotions, we often don’t have the space to dive into our intuitive and spiritual selves. We often don’t explore the state of being that directs us away from our physical bodies and the world around us into a higher consciousness and acceptance of our expansive minds.

Using clay sculpture and collage, I am looking to express a feeling of peace within chaos, a reminder that within each person there is a reflection of a higher knowing that connects all of us, and that we will always find it when we look inward.

Frank Sinatra School of the Arts
My Little Boy

Every night, I hear my cats jumping all over my apartment in the next room. I wonder what they do when I'm not watching, I dream about their secret lives. I felt that the only way to convey the scene in my head accurately to the audience was to create a moving image. I had a clear picture stuck in my mind of a cat leaping into a body, possessing them so they could do human activities. I sketched my ideas for a short stop motion movie, then drew inspiration from different claymation shorts and films to create the vision I had in my mind. Using sculpey clay I made my dreams come to life. I will continue to create art that makes me question essential parts of my life, like my cats.

Frank Sinatra School of the Arts
Session #1

In art, I feel as though we see this use of capturing things that are beautiful and creating things that are aesthetically beautiful. In my art I like to create pieces with themes that have a generally negative connotation. It's a fun challenge really, to take something so negative and make it beautiful and romantic. In this piece I try to capture the moment of recollection as someone begins their first therapy session and they are asked "why are we here?,” "What is the reason you are here?" In the piece, I decided to go with gouache since I thought it'd be fun to experiment and see what I could do. I've never really worked with it, and just know it dries matte and layers. Since that's what defines art to me, it's all just a big experiment to create something new.

The Clinton School
City of Memory

Our minds are malleable and fluid, and the memories we create aren’t permanent. In order to capture it, I recreated the area of Chinatown where my elementary school and afterschool was. My memory of the area wasn’t perfect, and the buildings I didn’t remember I demonstrated with looser wiring and shapes. How much do we really remember?

The Clinton School
Racial Confinement 

My work explores the questioning of identity and how to make the multifaceted self visible. Being a white, light-eyed Latina, I have been mislabeled, experienced microaggression, and forced into ethnic groups I’ve never identified as solely because they match my race. The world fails to accept or grow comfortable with people who don’t fit the stereotypes of their country. In the past, this mischaracterization and judgment made me embarrassed about knowing Spanish and unsure if I was worthy of calling myself Puerorican and Hispanic. The matryoshka dolls I painted begin with the Russian culture and Jewish religion I often feel forced to embody while slowly unraveling to the core of my Puertorican identity. The purpose of this artwork is not to disparage Russia and Judaism but to embrace their beauty while showing how they're what I’m perceived as, not what I actually am.

Gramercy Arts High School
Sol

My artwork “sol” is brought by my need of sharing my experience of the Brazilian queer subculture and the symbolism behind controversial behavior and spiritual integrity. This artwork attempts to show duality through contrasting symbols alluding to an artificial concept of heaven and hell through a biased lens of non-judgementality and adventure. The writing on the piece reads “My love you are like the sun, bring light to my day but burn my skin. Burn my skin” and that is a quote from the song ‘Burn My Skin’ by Baco Exu do Blues, a musician from Salvador, Bahia. Listening to that song while developing the central idea and intention of my artwork really helped give shape to the pacing and mood I wanted the piece to convey.

City As School
The Weight Of A Life

Through the use of wire, a strong but moldable and somewhat light material, I made a sculpture of a person being held up into the air by wire. I wanted to examine the weight of a life with this strong but light sculpture. I see myself in the little man creature I created, and I hope you do too.

Urban Academy Laboratory High School
Untitled 

I create art with the intent of capturing and preserving small moments that are often forgotten. The way the sun highlights a bit of lace, cherry blossoms precariously perched in a friend's hair, or even the glow of birthday cake candles.

I begin by taking a photo of a moment that is appealing to me, either with a film or digital camera.

Sometimes those images get lost among others, and sometimes they stick out, holding a place in my mind until I put them elsewhere. These photos are the ones I paint, sometimes mixing together the ones that give the same feeling: melancholy, nostalgia, content happiness.

These paintings are most often done in oil paint. I love the density of the paint, feeling the weight of it on my brush. Sometimes, however, I use acrylic instead. One of the paintings in this piece is done in acrylic, which allowed me to capture the candy colored fruit and fluffy frosting that the image presented.

Taking photos on film allows me to have full control over the final product. After processing them I am left with a negative that I can print over and over again, manipulating the size and exposure until it resembles the moment it was taken. Having multiple copies of one specific photo gives me the ability to relive that moment again and again.

By printing and painting these moments, they are solidified and made into something I can touch, something I can’t forget.

Highschool of Art and design
Being

My artwork reflects societal standards placed onto black women. The standard for black women in the media and in general is higher than others and we get less than others as well. To be more “presentable” and to have this standard of what is considered presentable higher and stricter. To convey this, I wanted to use bright colors to contrast the reality and systemic issues that caused this. The final product slightly differs, in the faces and painting style, from the original sketch but it still represents the point I wanted to make. Using Acrylics contributed to this and helped the process.