Teacher Name: Annamaria Castellucci Cabral
Additional Teacher Name: Miriam Socoloff
Grade: 12
Materials: Water soluble oils
Dimensions: 32 x 30 inches
Description: I am attempting to portray this grief, this dread and anxiety that I was under. Making this piece I felt vulnerable, it’s not a pretty sight but through it I recognized the anguish I was under, and began to let go of the loss that I had experienced. I recognized that people around me had their hands extended and were reaching to help. You can close your eyes and still there is a flame in the soul, always burning for love, always ready to start a new blaze. That’s beginning to feel optimistic. I can close my eyes and feel the positivity flow, the paint recharges me and I feel rekindled and sparked. COVID-19 has made the anxieties of loss greater, but in isolation it was lonely, yet there is an art to surviving it in the best shape possible. I found that if I could be conscious of my choices and emotions, I could start to ask myself to make more healthy choices for myself and those I love.
Artist Statement: My art abjects frailty and hardened impenetrability, which emerges from contemporary crises of identity, boundaries and limits as conditions of a post-modern, globalized culture. As an artist I am exploring these issues through portraits and self portraits that visually examine the relationship between bodies and the world. The dissolution of the body and the apparent breakdown of modern Western society brings an increasing despair regarding invasive systemic poverty, systemic racism, and neglect. Our mental health is relayed in the play of the body’s surface and in the effects of a broken system.This progressively happens on the body’s surface, a surface behind which the individual can withdraw into the recommended social shell of oneself. Our bodies can offer people convenient roles, “characters”, and an illusion of security in a world that would otherwise be in disarray. This analogy of the body as a defensive shield is a predominant and inescapable social construct, ensuring a singular personality. As we seek to find ourselves, our bodies can be either our physical or mental limits.
The motivations and concerns of my own art practice have been informed by these engagements with the body. Our bodies are always a part of us and knowledge of our bodies is necessarily tied up with the self and identity. I have attempted to think through our bodies in a vibrant and intense format. I have attempted to show that our bodies can be understood through the forces that have controlled and contorted them, and more closely as a reflection of the world today.
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