Task 1 Year 10 What Defines Us
Artist Statement: Ben H In my artwork I explored the concept resilience and how it impacts people. I aimed to provoke the audience to reflect and think about resilience and how it defines us as a person and how we experience it through life and the importance of it. Resilience is a very important trait that will benefit people. Being resilient means to never give up and keep battling through the hard times but will also encourage us to strive for success and achieve goals.
Artist Statement: Daniel C In this body of work I will explores the value and the importance of culture. In my artwork I aimed to represent my heritage through portrait photography and digital drawing, demonstrating the importance of family. By photographing and drawing my own family, I wanted to draw attention to the wonderful differences that my family traditions have, while also highlighting the similarities between all cultures and how we all have the similar core traditions and values.
Artist Statement:
Daniel C I chose the concept of reflection/image. This means I expressed that everyone is different on the inside and although someone looks fine, they may be hurting internally. I chose this topic because I believe it is a very relevant topic and something lots of people go through as social media grows and grows. As social media grows ever more prevalent in society it is important to not judge people of their social media presence and to know that just because someone make post happy images they may not be happy outside of social media, which is a big issue in today’s society that many suffer from.
Artist Statement:
Darcy G My artwork seeks to highlight acceptance and body positivity. I chose to do this by drawing my nose much larger than what it actually is. This was supposed to represent an aspect of myself that I personally found annoying, but I had accepted it an embraced it. That obviously being my nose. I draw my nose large as almost a form of irony in away; to show that I was happy with what it looks like. Today, we see many campaigns to encourage positivity and acceptance in both traditional media and especially in social media. This is where I gained a lot of insight into what my artwork could highlight.
Artist Statement:
Miku S “What is family to you?” This was the question I asked myself before starting on my final works. Coming from a Japanese background, in the last decade three generations of the ‘Sugimura-Tanabe’ household as found a home on Australia Soil; I wanted to focus on the way my experiences shape the way I view my family. With this discussion with my inner conscious-ness deranged from the statement of inquiry, ‘How we see ourselves can be different from how others see us’. For my photography component of this art task I utilised the family members I had at home. Using a tripod, and a camera at home,
Series 1
I was able to create a series of photographs focusing on my entire family and smaller subgroups of my family, as many have different relationships amongst each other. In the end I decided to choose several of my favourite photographs with a positive use of creative conventions; in which I made them black and white, and increased the contrast for better definition. I also added grain in the final product to create a feeling of ‘vintageness’ reflected towards my family history. The final piece of graphite drawing focuses on two of my grandparents, as I call ‘Baba’ and ‘Jiji’. While in my initial designs intended to draw figures of the whole family, throughout the planning process, I realised that decreasing the subjects within the art works would help ‘pull more focus’ on areas I wanted the viewer to see, and also helped improve the dynamics of the piece as well. Putting aside the ‘art stuff’, I always had a selfish want within me that wanted to draw my grandparents, while not for their ‘loveable’ faces, but rather to help communicate my appreciation for as they are the main figures in my life that shaped me to who I am today. While we did end up taking ‘hundreds of pictures’ in the photoshoot I had with the whole family, my final piece was revolved around a picture which I took accidentally without my grandparents knowing; my grandma poking her tongue out, and my grandma with a large grin on his face (which I like to note is never seen in photographs). I found this picture ‘natural’ in a sense, as it was never scripted or planned; but a mere scene with a funny joke (my grandad was talking about charging me for the modelling fees).
Series 2
Series 3
Artist Statement:
Viraj K My artist statement for this body of work was to provoke audiences to think about racial stereotypes of peoples. In this case Indians. I have chosen this issue for a few reasons. First of all, I am Indian myself so I have to face all of these stereotypes every day. So telling people how ridiculous they are would be quite useful for me. However, the main reason is that I’ve always enjoyed poking fun at myself and Indians as seen with my Carter Shield speech so I thought why not give it a try with art. Racism/stereotypes have been around for many years. Only recently have people understood that it’s fairly unacceptable to stereotype a culture with someone if you barely know them. So there’s been quite a history of racism against Indians.
Artist Statement:
Will Z The concept explored in my artwork is the act of judging oneself to harshly, yet others may view or not know how that person views him/herself. I chose this issue because it particularly relates to myself and felt that there was a lot of potential and possibilities to found. Self-judgment stems from the negative thoughts an individual may feel towards themselves. This, therefore, creates anxiety and decreases confidence and self-respect.
Artist Statement:
Oscar H The concept discussed in this artwork was “Perception over Connection?�. This specifically looked into how the connections within relationships differ from outsider views of the relationship. I chose this because of my interest/fascination of how people connect/cooperate with each other when there is a deeper connection than just friends. Through history, relationships have been pivotal to keep generations growing. However, society generally limited the relationships because of societal expectation. These limitations in relationships include people with large age gaps, different races, and same gender being shunned upon in public.