Throughout the creation of my exhibition, I began to discover more of who I was as both an individual and an artist. My experiences and personal discoveries of my identity were leading contributors toward the commonalities between my selected works. I wanted to convey my emotional personality as well as my identity as a whole through my exhibition, and I wanted my audience to view facets of my identity through my artwork. I utilized the various emotions that I have felt, especially stress, happiness, and the surprise of self-discovery, as I created my works and selected those that best encompassed my personality and self-expression as well as general feelings that I connect to myself as an individual.
The selected works within my exhibition each pertain to a different facet of my experiences and feelings. For instance, there are pieces that connect to my various emotions as well as to my identity in general. I have several pieces whose meaning directly connects to my anxiety and stress, including Deadline and I’m Fine. These are indicative of my personal experiences with negative emotion throughout the course of my life, especially in relation to the past couple of years. I also wanted to convey simpler aspects of my personality through pieces such as October and Arrangement, which respectively communicate my birth month and love for reading that has been with me since I was young. My pieces, additionally, act as a connection between my younger self and my current self. I wanted to display my growth as an individual through my pieces, and I did so with pieces that connect and show my identity as an individual as well. I also have a piece that is a spread in my journal, My Universal Shapes, that includes faded notes and various depictions of art and letters to fill the spread with my personality. There are several pieces that represent my sexuality as well as the emotion connected there, whether it be positive or negative since there are various dynamics that I experience because of it. These pieces include Aces, Reticence, It Comes and Goes, and one that is more loosely based on the idea of pride, Androgynous Expression and Nonconformity. All of the aforementioned works have various elements that encapsulate the feelings of pride and acceptance, isolation, and the underlying fear that it may alter a person’s perception of an individual.
With my exhibition, I hope to communicate my personal experiences and personality to the audience. The pieces are arranged as they are to show a clear connection between the ideas that connect to create who I am as an individual. There are distinct sections that focus respectively on my sexuality, my emotions, and my identity as a whole. This also pertains to my imagination and perception of the world as well, and I want the audience to be able to understand and relate to what makes me who I am. My vision for this exhibition is to encompass major aspects of my individual identity in a way that a viewer can comprehend enough to see who I am as well as how my mind works. I want a viewer to understand my emotions and my perspectives so that they can look at my exhibition and understand that the blend of all of my complexities and simplicities define my individualism and overall identity. A viewer should begin in the center and move either way as they take in my exhibition; the right leads to my emotions and creativity, and the left is indicative of my personal identity as well as my self-expression that derives from it.
