The sound of jazz floated warmly through the third-floor hallway on Friday, Feb. 12. Attendees filled the gallery on the opening day of the Identity Show, where students featured works that reflect their personal and family identities.
The annual Identity Show features pieces by all studio arts students. The works range from ceramics to drawings and paintings, as well as photo galleries.
Ceramics teacher Sarah Riley noted the way art faculty arranged the works this year. “The teachers have been working hard to mix the media around so that all the work is shown with the same amount of emphasis,” she said. In previous years, the art was strictly organized in groups by art class and course level. This year, works from different classes were often featured next to each other.
Sophomore Saida Debgupta, an Advanced Drawing and Painting student, said the mixed display made the show feel like a broader amount of artists contributed to the show compared to past years. Her piece, Seasonal Migration, featured a worm looking up to migrating birds. The worm’s eye view draws the viewer to the sky, which features a V-shaped geese migration pattern. The geese represent the journey Debgupta’s family took from different parts of the world and how her family ultimately came together.
Photography students displayed their work in accordion-like, five-photo sets connected to a theme or narrative important to them. “I don’t think I have seen that used as a method before,” history teacher Topher Dunne said, referring to the accordion-like display .
Freshman Caleb Barrow, a Foundations in Digital Photography student, expressed a narrative idea about his family in a five-photo display entitled Family. Three of his five photographs are of his family, and the other two are a record player and an elephant figurine. “Through family gatherings, we stay connected. Through objects, memories live on,” Barrow wrote in his artist statement.
Senior Rachel Lee’s painting, What I Carry, What Carries Me, expresses a combination of her thoughts about immigration and her life. She also shows how she deals with her thoughts—dyeing her hair, listening to emotional music and staying in touch with her culture as represented by a Chinese dress.
Junior Nina Heyliger, an Upper-Level Ceramics student, tackled gender identity with a clay bust of herself. “It’s about the experience growing up as a girl,” she said. “Your favorite color is supposed to be pink; you like princesses and stuff like that. It’s the inner thoughts of wanting to go out of gender conformity.” The back of the head of the bust is open with a racecar and a Spiderman figurine, both of which are toys Heyliger said are traditionally “boy stuff.”
The show will remain open until March 20.