Excitement is building at Stratford District Secondary School along with Gallery Stratford as a number of their students will officially see their art introduced to the public at Gallery Stratford this weekend.
The opening reception of the annual SDSS Student Exhibition goes on Sunday, Jan. 12.
“I’m very excited,” said grade 12 student Beatrice, who asked to only be identified by her first name. “I think it’s so cool that we get to have our art in a gallery before we graduate from high school.”
Beatrice joins roughly twenty students from Michele Carter’s senior art class at SDSS who will have their art displayed at Gallery Stratford until February 2.
Fellow student Laura, who also asked to only be identified by her first name, will be using the opening reception to highlight her artwork to her dad.
“I’m excited and nervous,” she said. “The reception actually is taking place on my dad’s birthday and he is coming, and he also studied art in school.”
The theme of this year’s exhibition is the Human Condition. Carter says the students came up with the theme through their own pieces of artwork that they have been working on all semester.
“The senior course is built around the idea that students get full creative freedom,” Carter said. “At the beginning of the year they spend time planning and developing a specific theme that is connected to them, and by the end of the semester there will be six pieces of artwork including one that will get installed at Gallery Stratford. After all the themes were developed we as a class started mapping them out and breaking them down to see connections between the themes, and all pieces started to connect to humans.”
The exhibit will feature a wide variety of pieces, everything from personal culture and identity to fantasy, and magic elements to human emotions relayed through bugs, pieces revolving around interior design, human relationships and everything in between.
For Beatrice, her piece revolves around the beauty of imperfection.
“I made a mixed media piece that includes some collages from magazine pictures as well as some embroidery,” she said. “My overall theme for the semester was the beauty of imperfection and how mistakes can be beautiful and how imperfection is okay. So this piece focuses on human imperfection, and how we are all made to be imperfect. So I took magazine pictures that are collaged together, so there may be eyes from one person, a nose from another.”
Laura meanwhile, used the semester to explore the nostalgia of growing up.
“I did a self-portrait which is really scary,” she said. “It’s an image of me holding a dying lamb. I used the lamb to symbolize innocence, and I wanted the piece to be about leaving this time in life when you don’t really want to. So I am grasping this dying lamb and I’m trying to hold on for as long as possible.”
Works from SDSS students have been on display at Gallery Stratford since 2016, and according to Director/Curator Robert Windrum the exhibits are always well attended by the public.
“It’s always something that brings friends and family of the students, so its a new and very enthusiastic audience,” said Windrum. “It’s not only just fulfilling our mandate to present young artists but it also brings a new audience to the gallery.
Windrum was also impressed by the theme of this year's exhibition and how it is addressed by the students.
“I would say the theme is very reflective of the times we live in,” he said. “A lot of the ideas address things like technology, aging, relationships, world politics and more. I would have to say there is a lot of awareness on bigger, heavier life issues, even maybe more so than when I was in high school.”
The SDSS exhibition opens up Sunday starting at 2 p.m.
