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WAB CURATED

WAB CURATED

Our artists

Our 2023-2024

Discover artist featured by WAB Curated in the school year 23/24 to learn about the artist experience of IB art students

Sophie

Serah

My exhibition records and communicates the various forms of surveillance surrounding humans. As I contemplate the concept of surveillance, I find myself caught in a dilemma about where surveillance begins and where we liberate ourselves from it. I invite the audience to question their perspectives on surveillance and challenge their awareness of it. Through my artworks, I aim to provoke thought about the pervasive yet often invisible nature of surveillance in our lives, encouraging viewers to reflect on their own experiences and the societal implications of being constantly watched.

A common element in all my works is the presence of birds. This began from my misperception of seeing the surveillance cameras on traffic lights as birds sitting side by side. Therefore, in my works, birds are used as a symbol of surveillance, evoking communication about various forms of surveillance through the distinct characteristics and stories of individual birds.

“The idea of change or flow is not new. It is almost a given, that students presenting their artwork in their last year of school embody a state of flux, reflective of a community in continuous change. The idea that we are living in a time of unprecedented unrest is, likewise, also not new. Every year this exhibition is surrounded by an aura of transformation, uncertainty, and unpredictability. Students are bombarded by these ideas daily, the vertigo of change, the frenzy that can only be navigated through adaptability, the rush of progress in an ever-shifting landscape. But the beauty of change lies in its unpredictability. The artists in this show are not responding to a new era through VR, AR, LiDAR, UX, coding or AI. Instead, they chose knitting, carving, cutting, embroidering, painting, soldering, or drawing. They picked mosaics, clay, copper plate etching stained glass, or stippling, over digital cameras, computer modeling tools and artificially assisted technology. The current streams towards connections with the body -toward forms of craftsmanship that are difficult to master, practices that disconnect from the virtual and evoke a haptic response in both artist and viewer.

This return to traditional techniques was never a deliberate reaction, yet it provides solace from the ubiquity of technology. Perhaps it is the connection with the hands, the ownership that this instills, or the time absorbed in the process,and “lost” in the practice of it, that makes these methods so compelling. Few of these artworks are immediate, few took mere hours, many of them took days, of repetition, boredom, silence, frustration, and meditation. Perhaps that is what we seek: an antidote to the fleeting, the instant, the automated. The current of change has brought us here, for now. But, of course, we remain in flux—where it will take us next, we cannot fully know.”

— Daniel Avila

Juria

This exhibition explores the conflict between the physical and mental being of humans. To delve in, I looked at this topic through the lens of migrants in China. There is a significant conflict in this social group because they are displaced from their hometowns, leaving their essence behind.

The centerpiece that demonstrates the comprehensive view of the topic is “Thousand Miles of Mountains and Rivers.” For this work, the conflict between the physical body and the mental being of migrant workers is evidenced by a performance where I reveal the faces of migrant workers on mountains through water vapor. The cyanotype allows a chemical process where the water vapor makes faces visible. These faces represent the migrants that had to leave these mountains and are now just a ghostly memory. The water vapor, the long scroll with mountains in ink, and the faces of the migrants are all references to Chinese painting. Continuing with this same topic, I created the work Overlay, which refers to migrant Workers in China who are uprooted from their hometowns to find better jobs. In this painting, mechanical arms dominate the foggy Hunan mountains, referring to the industrial labor in Guangzhou and that most of its migrant workers come from the rural mountains of Hunan.

Lucienne

The Body is a Collection

My exhibition titled The Body is a Collection serves to represent stories, experiences, and feelings connected to gender and identity through the contrast between gore and ornamentality; horror and beauty. Specifically, within varied historical, international, and personal contexts, the complexity of themes such as sacrifice, dignity, and power are illustrated through portraiture. Within each piece, representations of violence are balanced with juxtaposing natural or ornamental imagery, which is often reenforced with symbolism or mythological contexts. Inherently decorative, complex, and nuanced mediums such as printmaking and textiles support these prevailing themes. In terms of inspiration, artistic narratives, artists, and mediums such as orientalism, Manet’s influence on the impressionist movement, Graciela Iturbide, Japanese woodcuts, and Renaissance-era female anatomy can be seen in my work. However, as identity is a central theme in my exhibition, and its implications are displayed in many of my pieces, the influence of my personal experiences and my own relationship with identity is undoubtably present.

WAB CURATED

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