Joey Hong ’19’s senior project hangs in the PMAC Gallery. Photo by Praj Chirathivat/The Choate News
Walk into the PMAC gallery these days and you’ll be greeted with QR codes, a giant non-geographical map, empty seltzer cans, and a full-size table. These pieces of art, among many others in the show, are the work of Joanna Ding ’19, Sarah Gurevitch ’19, Joey Hong ’19, and Jeanne Malle ’19. These four seniors have been working up to their senior shows, the culmination of Arts Concentration, for months. Now, they are sharing their work with the community.
Each artist has a diverse set of work on display. However, for most of the seniors, their work is all connected thematically. For Malle, that common thread was herself. “As I was thinking about what to make,” she said, “I realized that I can’t really make art about other things without knowing myself first.”
For Malle, showing others who she is meant “showing what I see, what I find important, and what I’ve kept in my mind.”
Malle’s exhibit includes four sections: her older work, her ink collages, her photographs, and finally her wall of QR codes. The photos, Malle said, are illustrations of what she notices in the world. She took most of the featured photos just a few weeks ago in Japan; they mainly feature people going about their daily lives. There’s a photograph of two men on the subway and another of a child sitting in a park.
Perhaps the most eye-catching part of her show, though, is her massive wall of QR codes. Scan the codes with your smartphone and you’ll be led to videos, photos, and works of art — each of which represents Malle’s life in one way or another. “It’s like a visual diary,” she said. “My intention was that if someone scans the entire wall of 45 QR codes, they get a grasp of who I am and what my senior year has been like.” One code sends viewers to Jean Auguste Dominique Ingres’s painting “La Grande Baigneuse”, another to one of nine videos handmade by Malle.
Ding took her show in a different direction, electing to highlight a diverse set of both themes and materials with her work, illustrating her growth as an artist while a student at Choate. “When I first joined Arts Con, I was most proficient with pencils — colored pencils and graphite,” she said. “It’s really interesting to me that there actually isn’t a single work [in the show] that’s done in pencil.”
Ding’s show includes charcoal drawings, oil paintings, and digital art, as well as a tower of empty soda cans. These aren’t just any soda cans, though — they’re cans of Bubly, a brand of seltzer water and, as of late, Ding’s beverage of choice. “The meaning behind this piece is about façades and how fragile they can be — and also about my relationship with Bubly,” she said with a laugh.
“When I first started drinking a lot of Bubly, I didn’t really know where to put the cans. I was like, ‘These are really aesthetic, so I want to use them for an art piece.’ So I put them on my window sill, and they just kind of built up until you couldn’t see out the window anymore.”
Hong’s show focuses on just one piece: a gigantic canvas “map” of her life. “I wanted to kind of jumble all of my experiences into this immature kind of drawing,” she said. “It’s not super high art or anything. It looks like a kid drew it, and that’s what I was going for.”
The map features locations from Choate to her home in South Korea. The map is covered in black-and-white drawings, whimsical handwritten notations, and physical mementos including ticket stubs and seashells.
Like Malle’s, Hong’s work attempts to be a kind of chronicle of her life. “Throughout the process, I’ve come to the realization that I really don’t care what people think of my art,” Hong said.”This has really just been for me — a record of what I know.”
Above her map, there’s a letter-sized sheet of paper printed with the words “put the cockroaches in my head to sleep.” It’s a part of Hong’s show, too; the quote serves as another one of the memories she’s chosen to highlight. “That’s also from my little community in Arts Con,” she said. “Vlada [Sirychenko ’20] is from Ukraine, so she was telling me about a Ukrainian saying that basically says, ‘All of the anxieties in your head are cockroaches.’”
Hong also left her sketchbook in the exhibit for viewers to peruse. “I hope that people will flip through while they’re here, because that’s my work of two years or so. It’s really a representation of what I’ve done,” she said.
On the other hand, Gurevitch’s collection ventures into architecture and furniture design. The centerpiece of her show is a full-size, fully functional bedside table. She designed and built the table almost entirely on her own, learning how to 3D model and to use what’s known as a computer numerical control router.
According to Gurevitch, her inspiration in 3D design came from the tiny house trend. “The tiny house movement is kind of this ‘design, build’ mentality, so a lot of people design their house and build it on their own. So I don’t want to just have the design skills — I also want the skills to build on my own.”
Additionally, Gurevitch included a number of two-dimensional pieces in her show. The works combine paint, magazine scraps, plastic, and, in one painting, a severed extension cord to create what she calls “choreographed abstraction.” “There’s intent on where things are laid,” she said. But there’s randomness. “I just like finding things and seeing what I can make from it.”
The senior shows are the final installment in years of work for the Arts Concentration seniors — a conclusion to their artistic career at Choate. “Looking back,” Hong said, “the friends I’ve made and the personal growth I’ve had during Arts Con have made it all worth it. The goodbye is bittersweet, but that’s how it rolls.”
