While creating my body of work I chose to make pieces that related to me and put my identity on display, I wanted to make art about things I am most familiar with. Each piece represents my identity by putting my emotion, experiences, and culture at the forefront. Each piece contains a significant piece of one of those elements connecting my art to me. My goal with my art is to have others be able to relate in their own way whether it is directly connected to the original meaning of the art or their perspective. I think it is beautiful that art can have a variety of meanings and perspectives depending on who is viewing it.
All my work follows a theme of identity and each piece displays a part of my identity in a different way. I tend to use as many different materials, techniques, and mediums in my work rather than sticking to one because I feel each serves a particular purpose. Through these different techniques I like to explore issues or experiences I’ve had that impact who I am today and I believe how I change as a person is visible through the timeline of my work from junior to senior year. Much of my work that shows people happen to include people of color, my reason for this is that I am a person of color and when I was younger it was rare that I saw people who look like me or have similar features in a positive manner through art and media. But this experience shaped the art I make and the way I make it without that experience my art wouldn’t be what it is today. Due to this experience, an artist that I resonated with is Barkley L Hendrick. The reason being we have similar reasons for making the kind of art we do and his style is very vivid and lively which I admire and like to incorporate in my work. In my art, I like to use materials that best fit with meaning. For example in my piece shout, I decided to use oil pastel as opposed to oil paint or colored pencil because the multilayered strokes of oil pastel blend well but also look very chaotic which went well with the meaning behind the piece. It would have been harder to create that effect with oil-based paint and colored pencils wouldn't have blended so cohesively. The work I currently make definitely is different. With my older work I didn’t experiment much I just stuck to what I knew which made it less creative. So I definitely prefer my newer works and the thorough planning process I put behind them. My work reflects how I grew as a person which is a part of my identity. For my exhibition, I chose my best and personal favorite pieces to showcase and I appreciate how cohesive they look together. That was something I originally was worried about because there were a variety of colors and mediums and I wanted everything to look balanced and complement each other which in the end it did. For example in the center is my self-portrait, on the right is a piece that depicts a person who reflects on my personal challenges, and on the left is a picture of myself wearing my wearable cardboard piece. Each of the pieces is physically balanced in the exhibition but they also each show the parts of who I am that balance me out. Overall I really believe my exhibition displays art that is a piece of me.