Gallery Exhibitions

“This is temporary,” are three words I have often uttered to sooth my own anxiety. It’s a reminder that’s been like balm on a wound in times of trauma, transition, heartbreak, and uncertainty. Repeated to condition my brain into remembering: no matter the situation I am in, someday it will end. With this realization comes comfort; knowing anything that brings me pain is only temporary. But with that comfort comes the reminder that just like the pain, I am also temporary.

Though we of course all know this on some level, I believe most of us prefer to ignore it. The knowledge of our own impermanence can be incredibly disconcerting to think about. I also believe it is a fact best acknowledged and accepted. There’s no changing it, there’s no escaping it. Everyone and everything that is alive now, someday will not be. The nature of all life is transitory.

I have always been fascinated by the intricacies of human and animal anatomy. Skeletal systems, in particular, are endlessly captivating and inspiring. They are structures that enable our physical bodies to move about the world, complete all the tasks we need to survive, and they are also the last part of our bodies to decay; left behind after the rest of us has decomposed. I find beauty in this juxtaposition: our skeletons serve us our entire lives, assisting in the functions of our bodies, and yet the sight of them implies death. At the point that they become visible, they are simply remains of a being that was temporarily living.  

In this collection of work, a surrealist approach to depicting these physical remnants serves as a vessel for presenting the subject of death to the viewer in a way that is new, unexpected, and at times disconcerting. We live in a world surrounded by daily reminders of death, whether seen in imagery of skulls and bones, dead animals on the road, passing by graveyards on daily commutes, or mentions of people who have passed. However, these reminders so rarely access the part of our mind that possesses the knowledge of our own death. The artworks in this collection insert these reminders into settings that prohibit them from being ignored or overlooked. The viewer must stop to consider these symbols of death and their meanings, the connection they have to their surroundings, and to the viewer’s own experience.  

As a culture we are so submerged in the day to day that we rarely remember that it is all temporary. With this collection of artworks I aim to break through that superficial exterior to draw out in the viewer’s mind the knowledge of their own temporality. My work reminds the viewer of the physicality of our bodies, the fleeting nature of life, and ultimately points to the inescapable fact that we are all impermanent.

The Ingham Student Art Exhibit is a competition that is open to young people grades K-12 and students 18+ who participate in the Young Adult SE Program within the Ingham Intermediate School District service area. Each participating school may submit up to 20 entries of student artwork created during the 2022-2023 school year.

A qualified juror, Jane Reiter, will select up to 65 works of art to be professionally framed and exhibited. The selected artwork will be displayed for one year in Lansing Art Gallery & Education Center Student Gallery; the lobbies of the Michigan Education Leadership Group in Lansing, the Ingham Intermediate School District in Mason, and the Consumers Credit Union in Lansing.

During the month of April we will be hosting a full exhibition of all 65 works in the show. After that the works will travel to their off-site locations where they will reside from May 2024 to April 2025.