Exhibition Leisure Time

The most challenging experience during my high school career was doing the IB Visual Arts Exhibition. I had to experiment with different artistic techniques and elements to create a compilation of works that reflected my learning process throughout these last two years. Also, I had to write a curational rationale about it, and portray my ideas and explorations in a process portfolio. This whole experience gave me a real idea of what means and what does it take to be an artist. It also gave me the opportunity to work with different materials that I’m not used to, and broaden my artistic perspective.

My exhibition is titled Leisure Time because the main theme throughout it is entertainment, and what I do in my free time. Taking this into consideration I started doing a mental map with all the different words that I could relate to the theme, such as: partying, eating, listening to music, using my phone, among others. Later, with each word or action I created a work that represented best how I spend my time doing these things to avoid my reality and my responsibilities.

My favorite pieces are the ones I did with collage, "Sonic" and "Abundance". These demonstrate a 'chaotic energy' that somehow pleases and satisfies me. The first, represents my connection to music, specifically my favorite songs, while the second represents the 'party life'. They both use collage to combine different elements that shouldn't be together.

What I was most afraid of during this process was running out of ideas or creative fuel. The goal I had in mind was to do 11 works, but I ended up doing 10, because with the tenth I felt that the exhibition and the connection between works was well done and finished. The ideas can run out, but you just have to give your mind time to think and ventilate so that you can create new and better stuff.

Some of the works took months to finish while others took weeks. I am a very detailed and precise person so with my first works I focused on reproducing my idea perfectly. Later I realized that this process was not productive for the exhibition because a lot of time that could have been used doing other things was spent in one little detail of one of my works.