All Together Now

An individual pursuit, art is often practiced in isolation. An artist descends into the depths

of her own mind, returning with work she found there. So, when asked to work with others, as Upper School art teacher Pam Sutherland asked of her Honors Art students, the expressive result becomes a study in varying styles and their entanglement.

In late January, Sutherland’s Honors Art class masterfully displayed their collaborative exhibition, along with individual pieces, at the Visual Arts Center. The collective approach to art making that each group embraced embodies the individual spirit of each of the artists, held together in zesty, chaotic union. “Working collaboratively is not only a good way to reconnect with their peers, but reinforced the team aspect of this class,” Sutherland says of the exhibit. “Students learn things about themselves as makers that they could not learn on their own. Having to share in this way enhances communication and intention at the same time that it multiplies risk. Both of those tendencies, in my opinion, can only make art better.”

Publicly, the risk involved is vulnerability and exposure; privately, in the intimate space of a studio, the risk is competing varieties of artistic ingenuity. Creating art with the intention of displaying it beyond an artist’s studio adds additional intensity to the process. Exhibitions also invariably require a pressurized crunch of a deadline. There is the cloudy thrill of showing your work to a large audience, and there is the problem of creating the work itself and arranging it coherently on the walls of an exhibit, something every curator grapples with. “Knowing you are showing your work publicly lights a fire under students like nothing else,” Sutherland says. “And having a more compressed amount of work in a single space like the Visual Arts Center generates a larger, more captive audience. This is exciting — and nerve wracking — for students. In other words, another positive stressor.”

Eva Siminiceanu, Alexis Covington and Björn Petersson — all Seniors in Sutherland’s Honors Art class — responded to these positive stressors with dazzling flare. Typically dealing in referential abstraction, Björn found the approach exciting, and, slow to start, the group decided to lean on their individual strengths. “Eva and Alexis are both really talented artists in their own right, and I think we all knew what each of us was best at stylistically,” Björn says. “We decided to stick to what we were good at and build from there, feeding off one another.”

Like an improv group, one artist would make a mark and then another would respond to it, building a symphony of harmoniously cacophonous parts. Composed of three phases, their piece, like a statue of solitary parts molded together, narrates a story of growth. At the base of the structure sits a transparent box holding children’s stuffed animals, which props up a large piece of wood showing detailed portraits of the three artists. Above the wood, resplendently bundled, is a canvas, vaporous and painted the color of a raincloud, where some future is held, waiting. Art should resist interpretation, the experience of looking satisfying the impulse to analyze, but it’s hard not to see the delicately painted self-portraits and imagine those faces gazing somewhat timidly towards that gauzy and undetermined future. Looking at the piece echoes the sensation every high schooler once felt when asked the meddlesome question, “So, what are you going to do once you graduate?” The weight of possibilities throws you off balance.

As Seniors, contemplation of the past feels urgently appropriate as they look to what’s to come. But articulating the sensation of an approaching future is disorienting, the unknown difficult to express. The project, for this group, became a way of finding language for that expression. “Art is a way of expressing myself and learning more about myself,” Björn says. “And I’ve learned through this project to work with a group. Having other people rely on you creates a lot more pressure, and so I learned how to trust myself more when it comes to making art.”

Arranging the pieces around a large room in the Visual Arts Center offered a new experience for the students. They had the month of January to complete their work. Then, the day before the show, they collected their work and took it to the Visual Arts Center to display everything together. The show, “Collab x5,” a name that celebrates the collaboration of the five participating groups in Honors Art, was on display for a Sunday evening. Merging their talents, the groups exhibited a collective expression, an extension of themselves as a whole. “Having clean walls and a big space for the art makes the show look so much more professional,” Alexis says. “You don’t have a room full of chaos and color. Instead it’s this exhibit specifically for us and our art — and for everyone to see our art. That makes the show really special.”