KYLA EDELMEIER

For my colonialism piece this year, I knew that I didn’t want to have my piece be a commentary on the many issues caused by colonialism. As a white person, I feel as though it isn’t my place to voice my points of view on the subject, no matter how progressive or supportive, because white people tend to just speak over or speak for people in places of discrimination. While many don’t seem to spot the issue with this, when the only voices heard in the discussion surrounding colonialism (and racism) is that of white people, progress is impossible and other points of view aren’t seen. Instead, it is important to use your voice to reiterate and support the points and views of those who experience oppression. In this case, this is what I tried to do with my colonialism piece. I wanted to visually represent something that is not a cause of debate, but simply just a fact. I chose to address the Highway of Tears in my piece, as it is something close to home (both physically, as it is in BC, and emotionally, as it targets specifically women). Each leaf on the tree represents at least one First Nations woman who has either gone missing or been killed on the Highway of Tears, a 720-kilometre stretch of Highway 16 between Prince George and Prince Rupert, British Columbia. I chose to represent this topic in such a way because the Highway of Tears is a branch that has sprouted from a much larger tree of racism and colonialism, and this tree has many other branches and symptoms as well. The fact that it is a maple tree, with each leaf being a maple leaf, shows that this history of colonialism cannot be ignored as it is integral to the history of Canada, and to pretend as though it doesn’t exist would be dishonest to the true background of this country.

These three collages are a series, and they were the final pieces I made for my concentration. I was inspired by the idea of TV dinners, and how they were made and popularized the same time that television usage was beginning to grow. All together, when viewed in order, the series shows the progression of how television, and media in general, has begun to take over our lives; in essence, it depicts how the things we consume can start to consume us. For these collages, I really wanted to develop a specific theme through the series by using specific visuals and arranging them in an effective manner. I also tried to challenge myself by doing smaller, more intricate collages than I had in the past, and I believe it paid off!

This print series was directly inspired by the pop art movement of the 1950s-1960s, especially the works of Andy Warhol (particularly Campbell’s Soup Cans. 1962, Shot Marilyns, and Green Coca-Cola Bottles). The series is meant to address the interplay between mass production and individuality, and how one must be sacrificed in order for the other to exist. The 1950s was a time where consumerism was considered to be “patriotic” in America, and mass production, as a result, became increasingly used to appeal to a uniform market. Many pieces at the time were made to address this fact, showing rows upon rows of identical images. However, to make a piece about this time period in modern day, I knew I had to consider how our current society values ideas like individuality. Everyone wants to be unique and different from those around them, and yet we all buy into trends and popular items that are, at the end of the day, mass produced and formulated to appeal to us. This is shown in the prints as each bottle may have different colours and look unique compared to every other bottle, but at the end of the day, each print shows the same thing.

These four pieces are explorations of texture and materials. I wanted to explore some seemingly “gross” aspects of people/bodies, and see if I could artfully render an accurate depiction of the different textures onto a canvas. For the “Bone” canvas, I used crackle paste and gel sand texture mixed into acrylic paint, which I layered on the canvas and then used a sponge to achieve the texture. For the “Blood” canvas, I used gel medium to build up the texture, then I mixed a lot of gloss medium into different shades of red and covered the canvas, letting the canvas dry upright to achieve the drips I wanted. For the “Burn” canvas, I first started by mixing crackle paste into some dark brown acrylic paint and layered that in a couple of areas. Once that was dry, I put a lot of gel medium into a ziploc bag and cut one of the corners, and used it like an icing piping bag to draw the different raised lines. After that was dry, I used different colours of acrylic paint to finish it off. Finally, For the “Bruises” canvas, I only used acrylic paint, as I wanted to keep the canvas as flat as possible. I used a mixture of paintbrushes, sponges, and my fingers to get the different tones blended on the canvas.

This is my large canvas piece! I knew for a while that I wanted to do something more abstract for my large canvas, because I thought that if I was to try to do something Detailed and Realistic on such a large scale I’d probably go insane. I was playing around with colours on the canvas, mostly blues, greys, and browns, and the piece just began to resemble a stormy seascape, so I decided to go with that route! This piece was really therapeutic to do, because most of my pieces this year have been really focused on detail and realism (mostly faces and anatomy), so being able to let lose and not worry so much about things like shading and blending and anatomy was really fun and freeing. Also, I did pretty much all of this piece with a palette knife or a paint scraper (in some areas I used a big paintbrush, mostly to lay down the background colours, and in others I used a toothbrush to splatter paint), which was something that was new for me but super fun to do! 

This was my first time ever using gouache, and I thought that it would be a good piece to try it with as gouache gives a very matte poster-like finish, which I felt complimented the aesthetic of the piece. However, I found the medium quite difficult to work with, as it dried a lot quicker than I was used to from mediums like acrylic or oil. Other than that, I really liked the finish and the opacity of the gouache, and I think that it added a lot to the piece.

These two pieces were my first dabbles into the world of retro-futurism, and while at the time I had done a lot of research into the ideas of the art movement, I was still unsure as to how exactly I would approach some of the heavier themes I wanted to address within my concentration. So, in order to get my head around the basics of the concentration, I decided to just go with an aesthetic approach to the movement, and err on the side of irony. For these pieces, I was heavily influenced by “Popular Science” covers from the 1940s and 1950s, especially how they depicted robots and machines of the future. There is also a semi-dystopian feeling about these pieces (especially when the titles are considered), and that is because while I was making them, I was in the middle of a dystopia unit in my Creative Writing class, so those themes and ideas were on my mind as I worked on them.

(Also, I know that it’s kind of ironic because the meaning of my piece is hard to find unless you already Know. That’s the point. Sarcasm.)

This piece was heavily inspired by the classic paintings that depict Ophelia from Shakespeare’s Hamlet, including the paintings by Sir John Everett Millais and  Friedrich Wilhelm Theodor Heyser. Another, more contemporary influence was also the cover of Harry Styles’ self-titled debut album, in which he is photographed in a (pink) milk bath surrounded by flowers. This piece was challenging for a lot of reasons. Firstly, as this piece was the first one I started this year, I wanted to force myself to use vibrant colours, something that I hadn’t really been using in all of my Grade 11 pieces. I knew that colour was definitely something I wanted to utilize a lot this year, so I wanted to become more comfortable in using them. I also challenged myself by painting water, something I had never done before, as well as some pretty difficult facial anatomy. I am very proud of this piece, as it is a decently sized canvas with a lot of challenging elements that I forced myself to face head on. While this piece is finished for now as it is, I might revisit parts of it later in the year, once I become more comfortable in using these kinds of bright colours. One idea for an improvement is to add some small bubbles on the surface of the water around the flowers and the face, as that might help to sell the image of the water a bit better. Overall, though, I really do love this piece, and am excited to use the things I’ve learned about using bright colours, painting water, and structuring difficult anatomy in my other pieces this year!

This is my dove for the Hospice Society! This year, I wanted to focus on effectively using colour, contrast, and repetition to make a visually striking piece that also addresses the assigned theme of “celebration/hope”. I chose to use two contrasting colour palettes for the two different sides as I wanted to further challenge myself to create a unified piece that did not rely on colour to unify the piece together (if that makes sense). Instead, I used line and repetition to create two visually distinct, but still unified, sides of the dove. I also chose to paint more of an abstract dove compared to the dove I painted last year, as I felt that it allowed for more freedom and expression of the theme instead of focusing on capturing the likeness of a particular object/scene/etc. I really like this piece, and I think that both sides do work individually as their own pieces but together create a striking piece.

For my piece, I wanted to emulate these key features of this series, while also trying not to copy Pardee’s style or themes. I used colours that were much more vibrant than what I tend to use, and layered washes of watercolor to get my desired vibrancy and blend. I then went in with a fine-tipped pen to outline the colours in a way that would make it look like a slime/liquid, similar to in Pardee’s work. This piece took me over two weeks to paint and four days to outline, as it is rather large (which is also typical of Pardee’s work) and I found it was best to not work in sections but rather in layers of the whole piece. 

this piece is the first that I have finished in grade 12! it was heavily inspired by the theme of the 2018 Met Gala (Heavenly Bodies: Fashion and the Catholic Imagination). I’ve always felt that the crying Madonna statues were such a powerful image, so this is my take on the subject! I also really wanted to practice using coloured pencils to colour both fabric and skin, and I think that I did a pretty good job. my favourite part about this piece, however, is definitely the eyes and the tears. eyes have consistently been a difficult area for me, and while there’s still plenty of room for improvement, I am really happy with how they turned out in this piece!

I wanted to put my piece in the Grade 11 area because, even though my piece is pretty personal, I felt as though the emotions and ideas that I was conveying were fairly universal to everyone in my grade. We are all at a such unique point in our lives, where we’re all focusing on the future but trying to hold onto, and recreate, the past, before it becomes too late.