Each year, BIG ARTS collaborates with the Florida SouthWestern State College School of the Arts to put on an exhibition in the Dunham Family Gallery. The theme for this year's show is boredom.
Implicit in the concept of boredom is a desire to escape into a more interesting, engaged state of mind. In other words, it's a prerequisite for meaningful change. And it lies at the heart of an exhibition of paintings, mixed media, digital artworks and sculpture created by Florida SouthWestern State College students for the BIG ARTS show. Marketing Director Meghan Govoni provides the big picture.
"The exhibit is special because the singular theme, boredom, was the focus for a group of students throughout an extended period during their current academic year and it was the prompt for their annual arts competition called Art 24," said Govoni.
Art24 is an interdisciplinary art contest in which groups of students have just 24 hours to work together to create collaborative artworks based on a given prompt.
"The winning piece, a short film by a quartet of high school students, that's actually in the exhibit," Govoni said.
The BIG ARTS collaboration gave exhibiting students more than just exposure. They also got to hang the show themselves.
"The students brought the work in and hung it themselves," Govoni noted. "It was a big part of the process for them to see how it was to set up an exhibit on their own in a professional gallery. They got to work together and had to collaborate to figure out what went where on the floor, what went where on the walls," Govoni noted. "It was really fun to watch them bring it all together. It was a great experience for them and why we love this partnership with them so much."
There's nothing boring about "Boredom." It's on view at BIG ARTS through July 23.
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The theme of boredom has been a thread running through several courses taught at Florida Southwestern State College (FSW), including English creative writing courses taught by Professor Lynn Embick.
It was also the prompt for ART24 and the call to artists for the BIG ARTS exhibition.
That prompt read as follows:
"Unlike some of its synonyms, like ennui, apathy or tedium, boredom implies a resolve, positive or negative. In being bored, there is a will to escape being bored. Boredom happens when actions, situations or outlooks don't provide any meaning, challenge or interest. The escape is to challenge oneself to enable meaningful change. Change the parameters of the game to change the outcome. To make change then is to invoke boredom, as a prerequisite for change."
The student artists
The artists with work in "Boredom" include:
- Lidia Agostinelli
- Schuyler Kessler Anderson
- Faith Arsenault
- Jayden Becerra
- Jaun Cotes-Marquez
- Juliana Dominquez
- William Garcia Jr.
- Anabella Lorenzo
- Anthony Norton
- Ori Fernandez Restrepo
- Sadye Sandifer
- Rhea Schott
- Robert Schott
- Amelia Tadin
- Ethan Winters
The exhibition is provocative. The artworks varied. Some correspond directly to the theme of boredom, such as Anabella Lorenzo's sculpture "Patience" and Schuyler Kessler Anderson's "Bored to Death." In others, the connection is more abstruse, exploring instead the preconditions for escaping the doldrums of psychological stasis or a creative block.
Several examples follow, but they are by no means exclusive. As is true of any art exhibition, viewers can make a cursory examination of the works in the show or spend hours mining the compositions for meaning and connection. To paraphrase the Beatles, in the end, what you take is equal to what you bring to the exhibit.
Alexa Bastys Lytton
The central focus of Lytton's painting is a man reading a newspaper. He's surrounded by images from the fleeting stories he's reading from people's lives.
"I filled the canvas with contradictions; playing with perspective, size, proportion, different textures and exaggeration," states Lytton in his artist statement for the piece. "The right side of the canvas is a bird's-eye perspective of a board game, following the dual themes of 'bored' and 'chance.' The back of the newspaper stayed empty until the end. Not setting on any specific content or joke, I glued some random pages from a vintage magazine to it."
In this sense, the composition is a exploration of the mundane parts of life, namely, those that are most inclined to lead to boredom and which can serve as a catalyst for creativity if approached with a positive mental attitude.
Sadye Sandifer 'Besotted'
Sandifer intended her work in "Boredom" to encapsulate the concept of "Hanahaki Disease."
"[It's] a mythical Japanese illness that is depicted as the victim experiencing a growth of flowers within the lungs whilst facing the conflict of an unrequited love," she wrote in her artist's statement for the exhibition. "The term being broken down into 'hana' meaning flower and 'hakimasu' meaning to throw up."
Her review of several Victorian flower language books led her to choose the "mourning bride" because it signifies "an unfortunate attachment."
In this context, Sandifer equates boredom to stasis. One suffering unrequited love is stuck psychologically, unable to move forward.
"[W]hat may feel like suffocation from loss or unreciprocated feelings is just that, a feeling, not a reality," said Sandifer in her artist statement. "Are they real or something to make you fell better about the pain you feel internally? Something you can use to explain why it all hurts so deeply. Or the opposing viewpoint being that these flowers are SO real that they have sprung color into a grey reality?"
In the phraseology of the prompt for the exhibition, one besotted by unrequited love must "change the parameters of the game to change the outcome" and move forward to form new and truly meaningful and bilateral relationships.
Ethan Winters 'Snooze Fest'
"Snooze Fest" is a semi-autobiographical painting by Ethan Winters. It depicts the artist bored and nearly asleep at a desk apparently thinking about anything but classwork.
"When I think of boredom, I think of being in high school," Winters wrote in his artist statement accompanying the painting. "I was always bored after finishing my work, so I usually used my extra time to sleep or think about anything and everything else – [such as] the lyrics and music of some song, my work schedule, a text from a co-worker."
However, the process of pondering and painting the topic caused a shift in Winters' understanding of the term from "thinking of whatever" to "waiting for time to pass."
Support for WGCU's arts & culture reporting comes from the Estate of Myra Janco Daniels, the Charles M. and Joan R. Taylor Foundation, and Naomi Bloom in loving memory of her husband, Ron Wallace.
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