Inés

Curatorial Rationale

The art I made in this exhibition carries a very important message, that I believe will affect many people in the audience. I wanted to show the unimportance of perfection and “fitting in” to what most people believe society expects.  

To do so, I wanted to use a variety of media, partly to defy the idea of uniformity and the lack of uniqueness. For example, I only have a few drawings done with colored pencil, Pride and Growth are an example of that. However, the two pencil drawing are very different from each other in terms of the use of media as Pride is drawn on a black paper whereas Growth is drawn on a brown tinted paper. This difference is crucial in the way the drawing is made and perceived with the audience, as in Pride there is a lot of contrast between the colors and the paper, whereas in Growth there is very little contrast and the tones are very similar. 

Moreover, I divided my exhibition space into three different series, each comprised of three or four pieces. The reason for this division is for the message to be communicated more strongly to the audience. With the division of the pieces into smaller series, I could narrow the message into smaller parts. The overall message I want to convey is the acceptance of oneself as they are, without hiding or glorifying imperfection, but simply accepting them. To do so however, I found that taking the audience through the path of acceptance would be the most appropriate way to convey the message. Therefore, I divided my pieces into three parts of that path.  

First of all, before the person even accepts their imperfection, they would try to hide it. Including this in my exhibition brings the audience closer to the art so they begin to trust it. It is unreal to expect people to simply accept their imperfection without trying to hide them. For this reason, the first three pieces of my exhibition evolve around the hiding and pushing down on the imperfection, rather than going straight to acceptance. Although the first piece really shows the want to hide the imperfection, the second and third piece slowly move towards the accepted growth of that imperfection on the individual. This allows the audience to ease into the realization of the possibility of acceptance of the imperfection. 

Next, I wanted to show the audience that the imperfection can grow without negatively impacting the individual. To do so, I showed different ways the imperfection grows without the individual fighting the growth and without any negative repercussion. This middle series is the most important and delicate one of the three series. It connects the individual rejecting the imperfection to the individual accepting it. Therefore, essentially this middle series shows the path of acceptance. None of the pieces in both the first and the second series actually show any imperfection per se, however, the imperfection is shown through metaphors, such as light and leaves. This allows the audience to reflect on the pieces no matter what they believe their imperfection to be. Since there is no imperfection directly shown, the audience can see themselves in the individual going through the acceptance of the imperfection regardless of their own imperfection. 

Lastly, the last series I created was to show actual imperfections on individuals. This would allow the audience to concretize the idea of the acceptance of an imperfection. Although some imperfections are specific, such as vitiligo, others are rather general and not rare. Since the audience can see the result of acceptance of an imperfection, they can begin to understand the message I am trying to convey.