2017 Student #2
Ap Studio Art: Drawing PORTFOLIO
Concentration:
|
What is the central idea of your concentration?
In my concentration, my goal was to examine white suburban culture. Originally, I was inspired by 40’s and 50’s suburbias, whose inhabitants seemed to only consist of cookie- cutter families. This research encouraged me to think that in an attempt to reach the “american dream,” people in these communities became the same. My concentration explores the atmosphere of social perception, conventions, and status in american culture with a focus on white suburban neighborhoods. How does the work in your concentration demonstrate the exploration of your idea? You may refer to specific images as examples. Throughout my concentration, I studied historical housing settlements called “levittowns,” in which the houses were almost identical and were organized in neat rows. These neighborhoods motivated me to work with repeated images of houses, as seen throughout my concentration, but especially in images 1 through 4. In images 5 and 6, I began to explore the idea of “stacked houses,” homes squished together to become one because the people inside of them were so seemingly similar. In images 7 and 8, I started to use quotes to express my perception of suburban neighborhoods. The words “those in glass houses” in image 7 are the beginning of an old quote about social perception in neighborhoods- a community of neighbors watching each other. This piece inspired the next, an aerial painting of suburbia accompanied by text that to me represents a culture of judgement and domesticity. This idea of forced domesticity, applied to suburban social conventions, led me to works 9 through 10. To express this, I began incorporating traditional feminine symbols into my art, like the rolling pin in image 10 and the lace in images 9 and 11. At the conclusion of my concentration I felt that suburban culture and american idealism had trapped people, prevented them from living how they wanted. My final piece, image 12, conveys this entrapment. |
