Curatorial Rationale

What I wanted to achieve with my work was to tell my audience a story, whether in a more obvious manner through comics and animations or through more static, individual pieces and dioramas. I believe that it is through stories that we best convey emotional experiences and different perspectives (the theme of my exhibition) especially if they are difficult to put into words, resulting in me choosing this way of expressing my work. In my experience, complex emotions are best understood if you feel them, hence beginning my efforts to try and guide my audience through a visceral experience when viewing my work that may open them up to looking at things from more perspectives than one.

Because of the breadth of my focus, I was able to play with a wide range of mediums, techniques and ideas when creating my work. One of the more specific topics I wanted to focus on was oblivion and unawareness from my own experience. One way in which I did this in multiple pieces was by manipulating size and perspective. An example of this in my work is “The Fog’s Inhabitants”. With this piece, I wanted to make the audience question what was real and what wasn’t, attempting to replicate my own experiences with drifting from reality. To do this, I created larger-than-life animals placed in a mundane setting, creating a heavy juxtaposition between the mundane and the fantasy that I, a character in the comic, am unaware of. No matter the size and striking colours of the animals, I remain unaware of their existence. Manipulating size to explore this theme is also seen in my piece “Into Oblivion”, a diorama of the fairytale Little Red Riding Hood. By making the entire piece physically large and placing the entire setting of the tale inside of a wolf’s mouth I wanted to exemplify how to us, we can clearly see that Riding Hood is in danger, but from her perspective, she is merely walking to safety, the cottage. Another idea I explored was duality by looking at folktales from “two sides of the coin”, more specifically how only one side of the story is often presented. This was done by recreating murals of legends but giving them a sense of irony as instead of depicting perfection and triumph, I depicted imperfections and injustices.

My piece “Toward Fruitless Endeavours” is an example of one of this as I twisted a tale of rewards that come from perseverance into a representation of the nonlinearity of success, how there can come times where the things we strive to achieve are not what we wanted at all. By twisting known legends and folktales to convey my own ideas, I feel as if I have added an extra layer of depth to my work.

For the arrangement of my exhibition, I really wanted to immerse my viewers into a realm of story and movement. To do so I utilise the scale of “Into Oblivion” to immediately strike the viewer upon initially viewing my area as I feel that, thanks to its size and 3D nature, no matter where I place it would draw the viewer’s attention and immediately set the mood of my exhibition. Because physical perspective is really important to this piece, I placed it diagonally on a short podium allowing people to walk around it without taking too much space from my other pieces. The colours of my 2D other piece and the unity of them would also provide an immersive experience for my viewers. My comics would be gathered closer to one another as they are united by medium. Their colour schemes are also rather distinct, making them more appealing to the eye if they were gathered together. My other laser-cut piece would be grouped together due to all of their sourcing from folktales and legends. With this arrangement, I hope to make my exhibition a smooth experience, one piece flowing into another and nothing seeming jarring and out of place and yet still portraying to my audience that they are of different inspirations.