Upper School Art Exhibition Shows Westridge’s True Colors

Just weeks from the end of school, Westridge art teachers wipe down their tables, and students frantically work through lunches in preparation for their final exhibition. The Upper School Art Exhibition is a chance for students who spend their year working (literally and sometimes figuratively) underground to share their work with family and friends.  This year’s exhibition took place on April 26 and included contributions from students enrolled in Photography, Painting and Drawing, Time-Based Art, Clay Design/Sculpture, and 3D Design.

 

Students chatted and ate cheese pastries at a small reception outside of the Commons before heading into art classrooms all over campus, where they were treated to a veritable feast of visual delight. Painting and Drawing I & II used acrylics and 3D mediums to create pieces inspired by Pritzker prize-winning architects. Photography I & II, respectively, bared their souls in studio-lit black-and-white self-portraiture and demonstrated their technical skills with delicate albumen prints. Time-Based Art set up screens and headphones in Burgess Gallery for passerby to immerse themselves in short films and audio pieces that had themes like horror and civil disobedience. 3D Design I & II created ornate lamp shades and carapaces using various mechanisms like lithography and 3D-printing. Down Ayrshire Court, Clay Design and Engineering arranged table settings they had made, exhibiting their technical prowess with teapots and their creativity with colorful themes, from nature to fried eggs. Ceramics I lined the Main Hall with feet-high feats of physical engineering in the forms of hand-built vessels in unique shapes. Studio Seminar, an elective for advanced artists to experiment in different mediums and creative directions, occupied the Burton Gallery with large-scale explorations in photography. The ceramics, photography, and painting studios, as well as the Sigrid Burton, Massar, and Burgess galleries, housed art during the event.

 

After almost a full school year of hard work, Westridge art students relaxed and celebrated at the Upper School Art Exhibition, where they got to display the fruits of their labors— from a surrealist painting of an orange with a toothy mouth to a giant ceramic strawberry.