Look to the Futurechalk pastels and colored pencil on textured paper This art piece, made with chalk pastels and colored pencil on textured paper, is a meditation of time and the future. The two bright stars illuminating either side of the artwork represent two aspects of time, past on the left, future on the right. The person in the middle is myself, my back turned to one star, and facing the other. The subject of the piece centers on my conflicting feelings around the idea of the future. One of my eyes is forced open by a hand above, symbolizing societies constant force pushing us to look to the future, to understand it, despite the futures uncertainty. The star on the right is chaotic and filled with color, it is hopeful, overwhelming, and caries colors of the past, mixed with ones not yet felt. While one eye is open to the future, the other is closed, showing how the future can be hard to confront or address. This closed eye represents, in some ways, my fear of the future, and my wants to ignore it. Behind me is the star of the past, its color palette rigid in cool tones. The past cannot be changed, though bands of its light make their way to the right side of the canvas. I placed myself in the center of the artwork, not just to separate past from future, but to stand as the median between them. It is a human hand that compels us to both see and ignore the future, and us who stand to give it definition. It is you, and me who are the symbolic stars of the present, standing as the sole observers of time. |