Art

Moses Ojo is a young Nigerian art enthusiastic who uses his mind as a Vista for making captivating arts while using his brushes and watercolors,— thereby speaking reality through his arts and crafts to his viewers.

(Pond Torus)
I was inspired by the astrophysical hypothesis that our universe is shaped like a torus. The inside is clear-glazed so it is able to hold water as a canteen, or oil bottle. I chose the light green glaze to mimic the colors of a pond I grew up next to. In my childhood, that pond was my universe where I spent almost all of my time catching guppies, swimming with my best friend (a raggedy, adventurous dog named Cookie), and identifying flowers with a field guide tucked under my arm.

Elizabeth Duke-Moe is a senior in high school in Boise, Idaho. She has spent her youth growing up in the mountains and swimming in the surrounding rivers. She draws a large amount of her writing inspirations from her Norwegian ancestry and the Sawtooth forests in Idaho. She loves to travel anywhere as long as she can document trees, flowers and animals. She throws pottery in her free time, performs necropsies in Idaho’s Fish and Game genetics lab, and always carries flint and steel. She is the first queer All Student Body President at her high school and a leader of a conservation group working to save endangered Northwest salmon. She loves dill pickle sunflower seeds.

Objects, both mundane and precious, all play a role in the context of our lives. In this piece, I took a selection of objects and presented them as if they were standing at a particular point in one’s timeline. With a splash of creativity, I placed my earphones, lipstick, shoe, jelly treat etc., on sushi rails, each of which embeds different memories of my life. Time ticks at a constant pace for everyone at every moment. Great moments fly by, however, while hardships seem to linger around in slow motion, like waiting for your favorite dish on a sushi rail that simply never comes. When I hold an object that is meaningful to me, it acts as a time machine, transporting me to different spots of time seemingly forgotten.

Jaeyeon Kim is a fine artist who works to claim spaces for the public to engage with art without difficulty. Her work often revolves around detailed paintings, installation art, and sculptures, which become a place for social engagement and visual communication.

I was inspired by multiple surrealist painters to portray environmentalist issues. The person on the left represents the physical affects of oil spills on living organisms. The person on the right represents the destruction of the planet by careless and ignorant business and corporations (hence the business suit). I usually like to keep my paintings by themselves without a description so that the viewer has time to feel and respond with their own opinions. But I’m happy to share—

Selah Dungey is a senior at Newark Academy. She has been immersed in art classes since freshman year, and enjoys using symbolism in order to create narratives. Paradise, was painted to be part of an IB Visual Art Exhibit and is pivotal for how Selah has changed her style, and how she tells stories through art. It is meant to be confrontational and force viewers to realize the physical effects of pollution.

In this artwork, I wanted to reveal the implications of dictatorship: how violence gets censored. Inspired by the Gwangju Uprising that happened in South Korea on May 18, 1980, which could be called the older brother of the 1989 Tiananmen Square Massacre, and the 2021 Myanmar Crackdowns. Even though this event should have made headlines around the world like the latter two, it was covered up by the authoritarian regime. People who grew up in South Korea in the 1980s, even my own mother and father, would not learn the full truth, such as the brutal beatings and shootings, until the late 1980s when the authoritarian regime was finally toppled. One noticeable feature that incorporated into this artwork would be the number of squares occupying certain areas. I purposely used solid colored squares over my graphic art since I wanted to portray the message that such an event was “covered” up by the dictatorship. The medium of this artwork would be acrylic paint. 

The motive behind my painting was to portray the true horrors and oppression the Korean people faced in the 1980s when the country was run by an authoritarian regime, which is similar to the oppression conflict in Myanmar today. Even though Korea had prevailed and became a fully democratic nation, I wanted to make an impact with my drawing by showing the difficulty and struggle in order to achieve this freedom. For this specific painting, I incorporated a half black and white effect to the colored picture in order to portray the message that these were gloomy times when the future of the country was bleak and uncertain. The medium of this artwork would be acrylic paint, in which I constantly mixed a bit of grey with the original colors to portray this ½ black and white mood.