About The Exhibition

This collection of works explores an important lesson that I learned over my gap year, which was a self-initiated hiatus from what I saw as the burdens and constraints of school. I craved a complete freedom from the restrictions of routine, but I found instead a bizarre paradox. I discovered that utter freedom was not as liberating or exhilarating as I had previously assumed; in fact, utter freedom was anxious, isolating, and unavailing. During that gap year, I found myself completely stagnant- completely miserable. But I did learn one thing: the necessity of gravity.  I learned that in life and in art, we need that force of friction that grounds us. We need restrictions and constraints in order to find direction. To create, we need to struggle against something. It's within that struggle that beauty is created. This collection seeks to explore that very idea of gravity being a limiting yet liberating force, and how my personal definition of freedom exists amongst constraints. 

To explore these ideas of freedom amongst gravity, I created various works demonstrating the balance between constraints and liberation. I chose to work extensively with denim and pastels, with both serving symbolic purposes. Denim is historically a fabric that represents universal freedom, embodying the wayward recklessness of cowboys in ancient Western films and even serving a rebellious purpose during the Cold War era. In popular culture, it has become the quintessential fashion of the free youth, and I adopted the fabric to symbolize the concept of freedom in my works. For example, in my ‘Freedom’ piece, the denim is nailed down to structured canvases. This represents how my personal freedom exists amongst constraints, and how those constraints are necessary in order to find form and direction. The darker side of these constraints are revealed in my ‘Decay’ piece, where the overly confined denim demonstrates how too much restriction can be suffocating and lead to the ‘decay’ of freedom. These works, together, show the importance of maintaining a balance between liberation and constraint in order to create a perfect gravity. 

The pastels more subtly represent individuality within my works. Color is the primary tool that I use in order to convey varying emotions and character within art, and pastels were an apt pigmenting medium. Moreover, pastels can be manipulated to various effects, with blending creating a smooth gradation between colors and lathering creating distinct layers, which I thought was conceptually relevant to my collection as it explores varying degrees of balance. In the ‘Gravity’ works, the colors represent the natures of each figure and their surrounding environment. In ‘Gravity 1’, the whimsical colors of the body reveal an alienness to the figure, and add a comical element to his predicament. The dull surrounding colors of his environment starkly juxtapose the bright figure, showing how out-of-place the creature is. The use of colors was integral to depicting the picture of an extraterrestrial struggling to adjust to Earth’s gravity, and helped develop the message of how different individuals exist amongst different levels of constraint and freedom. Similarly in ‘Gravity 2’, the colorful fireworks in the background reveal the environment as somewhere exotic, somewhere magical, whereas the more muted colors of the figure reveal him to be a more mundane creature. Colors, again, become integral to completing the depiction of a human figure floundering in space, and the juxtaposition between the environment and the figure in both works also add to the element of tension and balance present within gravity that is explored in my collection. 

I wanted the concept of gravity to be apparent in every possible aspect of my works, especially in its presentation. The denim pieces are all hung from the wall, where gravity quite literally holds the works in place. I want viewers to notice the gravity holding these pieces and simultaneously feel their own feet tied down by the same force, allowing them to consider their own constraints and liberations and evaluate the balance that exists between these two opposites in their own lives. Through these works suspended by and dedicated towards gravity, I hope to stimulate viewers to define their own freedom.