Gallery • 2 Photos

Alexandra Cardwell

INTERACTIVE ABSTRACTION: Senior Quenby Wilson’s contribution to the exhibit is meant to be an immersive experience for viewers, with headphones and a video screen.

Though cookies and lemonade drew students in, the talent and ingenuity of the featured student artists in the Fall 2022 Advanced Art gallery easily retained the audience.

Students, teachers and parents filled the gallery for the whole 45-minute period of advisory on Wednesday, and all who attended the exhibition thoughtfully examined the presented work. The show featured work from 15 seniors and six juniors.

This year, the theme for the exhibit was abstraction. In accordance with the theme, students took their work in several different directions, including their use of various mediums, color palettes, textures, and compositions.

Senior Lily Malloy’s featured work was even intended to be touched by viewers. She presented a flipbook as her addition to the exhibition. Malloy, a seasoned ballet dancer, took inspiration from her years of experience in the ballet world. Using her ballet background combined with her four years of experience in photography, Malloy created a flipbook that was an up-close shot of her friend and fellow ballet dancer’s pointe shoes. The cover of the book features a black and white wide-shot image of a dancer doing a pirouette, and inside the covers, the flipbook is in vivid color and shows Malloy’s subject in fifth position. For Malloy, allowing students to touch and physically experience her creation was the best part of the process.

“I loved putting together all of the pieces in order and then getting to flip through for the first time,” she said. Malloy fully embodied the theme of abstraction with her zoomed-in, detailed shot of the pointe shoes and the rare medium.

Senior Maya Ketema vividly brought out the exhibit’s theme of abstraction by creating two paintings of the same image: one lifelike and the other distorted. To do this, Ketema utilized two medium-sized canvases for her project, which are hung directly atop each other. The upper painting brings viewers right back to Ketema’s childhood: laughing kids, face paint, birthday hats, candles, a bright blue birthday cake and a cheerful tablecloth. The painting below is nearly the same, but blurred. Where the upper painting has detailed faces, down to the painted-on cat nose and whiskers, the lower painting has blurred silhouettes, though the same color and mood. Ketema was inspired by the time she has spent with family and friends lately.

“I was looking back at some pictures and I realized that a lot of these parties and things that happened when I was younger, I don’t really remember them, or the pictures,” Ketema said. For her creative process, Ketema first painted the detailed painting. Once this was complete, she began a new painting, focusing on the shapes and colors of the first painting, not the granular details.

The largest painting in the exhibition was created by senior Wyatt Tait and portrays abstraction through its duality.

“I wanted to paint something big,” Tait said.

The painting was taller in height than any attendee at the opening of the exhibit. Tait’s work features three nearly life-sized figures. The leftmost figure wears a detailed suit, with thick, layered, brush strokes depicting the draping of the fabric. The figure to his right appears next to him, though is what seems to be a shadow. The shadow is black and white and stands alone. The final figure, on the right side of the painting, is much less formal. Though still in a suit, this figure’s suit is drawn with numerous vibrant colors and in thin brush strokes—suggesting it was drawn with crayon. Similarly to Ketema and Malloy, Tait took his own spin on the theme of abstraction.

The gallery is open daily and will be available to students for the next few weeks.