AP Art of the Week
Spotlight on Artist Aiden Seeley
Welcome to The Elective’s digital art museum, dedicated to the incredible work of AP Arts students. This week we feature a digital collage made by Aiden Seeley from Parker School in Kamuela, HI.
Welcome to The Elective’s digital art museum, dedicated to the incredible work of AP Arts students. Each week we highlight a work or series created in one of the AP Arts concentrations—AP 2-D Art and Design, 3-D Art and Design, and AP Drawing (the AP Program also offers Art History and Music Theory)—as well as a statement from the artist (and, occasionally, their teacher).
From the first cave paintings to contemporary breakthroughs in virtually reality, art, in all its forms, has been a crucial way for people to process, make sense of, comment on, and grapple with the world around them. In 2020, there is a lot to process and grapple with—and AP Art students have risen to the challenge. The work many of them submitted in their final portfolios is explicitly of the moment, from commentary on the covid-19 pandemic to the celebration of people of color to the nature of heroism in perilous times.
The work is often challenging and provocative but always insightful, inspiring, and expansive.
This week we feature a digital collage made by Aiden Seeley from Parker School in Kamuela, HI.
Here’s Aiden’s statement on the work:
“Where is the boundary between dream and reality?
We are perpetually stuck in a loop, sleeping and waking only to repeat the cycle again. My process begins with gathering found imagery and deconstructing, cutting, and layering them to convey feelings that capture that place between being asleep or awake. I practiced with cutting and combining images to evoke dreamlike feelings.
The first image is relatively undistorted and is bound by reality. I then began experimenting with distortion to convey surreality. This change through my concentration is also indicative of my artistic journey this year. What began solely with the human form descended into geometry, patterning, and repetition, all towards the single goal of expressing the uncertainty of our existence.
This piece seeks to explore feelings of paranoia and claustrophobia. Images are layered over one another to create to create geometric shapes that confine the subject, inspiring feelings of isolation, confusion, and terror.
Camus wrote that, “Man is the only creature that refuses to be what he is.” Through my art, I seek to understand what life, reality, and self mean to me.
Am I alone? Are there others?
What watches me?
I believe the answers may be found somewhere between our conscious and subconscious mind.”
And here are a few more pieces from Aiden’s portfolio:
This image seeks to explore feelings of uncertainty and body dysmorphia. Lines obscure the subject's face and body, blurring their boundaries and blending the forms together and distorting the boundary between dreams and reality.
Images are manipulated to explore the restlessness and agitation in the boundary of dream and reality. The subject's face is framed by a single, random square as the subject falls further into absurdity.
The image is distorted and layered to represent the beginning of the descent into surreality. The subject peeks out from between the bars that bind her to reality.
This piece explores feelings of dissociation. The subject's hand passes through her face, which is repeated, creating a sense of confusion as she crosses between dreamstate and reality. Images are layered, showing her penultimate step towards surreality.
Student statements are lightly edited for clarity.
