Daisy Ansen
“What is your favorite artwork?”
Curatorial Rationale
For this exhibition, I guided my work under the overarching question of “What makes a person?” I chose to shape my artworks around this question because I have always had a sort of fascination with the fact that people are all different because of external and internal factors that have built up over time due to various events or occurrences. The intention behind all my exhibited works was to prompt viewers to consider their human existence and the different aspects that make us who we are. Some, like Monster to Myself and Past and Present to the Future, seek to capture the human experience in a way that the viewer can relate to. Other works simply seek to document life as a human or raise questions about what it means to be human. These particular works were selected out of all the artworks I have created these past two years because they spanned to cover the good, the bad, and the neutral of humanity within the small number of eight works. These exhibited works are also more general in the sense that they represent more universal ideas a wider audience will relate to in some way.
In the majority of the displayed works, the gaze of the subject is used to communicate the main concept of each work. Instances where eyes are looking at the viewer are used to ground the viewer on the eyes in question and creates a connection between the subject and the viewer. This connection gives the viewer a path to consider how the subject is feeling, which leads to consideration of if the viewer shares the sentiments.
The color red is also used relatively often. I have used it to represent violence and passion in Monster to Myself, Inhuman human, and Our Relationships, but also simply as a color that exists in the world, inherently meaningless in With the Paint We’re Dealt.
A common theme in the works is the acquirement of a sense of self, whether it be considerations of self-perception, questioning the purpose or direction of each person’s life, the filter through which we view everything, or how a sense of self factors into as well as is developed by the role a person holds in interpersonal relationships. I drew upon my own experiences of perceiving myself in different contexts for many of the artworks to make the emotions of each work feel more real.
I wanted to display a mix of the good and the bad side by side with the more neutral pieces, so my arrangement of my works does not sort the arts into groups based on which ones I consider to be depicting “bad” qualities of human life. In the real world, the good and the worrisome coexist, so instead, I found it important to ensure that there was a balance of color with the way things were displayed because it would unite the artworks. In this way, the viewer will see the exhibit as one larger artwork encompassing the ideas and experiences that make people the way they are. Viewing this larger artwork will then feel like viewing a snapshot of human life as a whole, which is what I want to show the viewer.
Daisy’s Art Work
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Inhuman Human, 2023
Thread and Fabric Paint on Fabric
12.3 cm x 12.3 cm
Because part of my theme deals with who we would consider a human, I wanted to depict the violence people are capable of, actions often labeled “inhuman.” Whenever the word “inhuman” is used, its function is to denounce the doer of evil as “one of us people,” which I find interesting because it equates being human to having compassion and incapable of cruelty, despite us knowing that people have been responsible for many crimes and cruelties throughout history.
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Artificial Life, 2023
Digital Art in Medibang Paint
30.5cm x 38.5cm
I was inspired by recent developments of robots that can mimic human movements to an accurate degree and AI Chatbots. As part of my theme of “What makes a person?,” I wanted to ask the question “Can robots with artificial intelligence that can look like us and communicate with us be considered human?” Through dividing the face into two sides, I wanted to present both the part of AI and robots that are close to passing as human and the calculating machine side we fear.
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Monster to Myself, 2023
Digital Painting in Medibang Paint
30.5cm x 36.6cm
Some of the biggest factors that have shaped me and many others are our insecurities. In my artwork, I have represented my insecurities through the strand of hair being examined, the salad, the flesh being ripped off the face, and the jacket meant to cover up my arms. The background of a social media feed and the pointing fingers give light to the origins of these insecurities, and I included splatters of blood and monster parts to further the narrative that what I am is not what I should be.
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Window to the World, 2023
Acrylic Paint on Canvas
30.48cm x 41.56 cm
I wanted to express how one way people are shaped is through the way people view the world. I painted eyes because they symbolize sight and included different expressions and different features from several different people around me to explore the variety of different worldviews and resulting personalities that can be found in one small area. Also as a part of conveying this, the mix of colors in the irises is unique to each pair of eyes.
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With the Paint We’re Dealt, 2024
Acrylic paint on canvas
40.4 cm x 30.3 cm
Two things most people have in common are our control over our actions as well as our lack of control over our circumstances. With this artwork, I wanted to express our efforts to create something with the circumstances we are given, so I painted a self portrait of myself using paints squeezed onto my palette by an unknown entity. I covered the canvas in streaks and blobs of paint to make it busy, a quality shared by the world around us.
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Our Relationships, 2023
Digital Art in Medibang Paint
28.4cm x 45.7cm
Each person’s life is shaped by the relationships they have formed around them, so I wanted to create an artwork that represented relationships through personifying the 5 types of love that I selected out of the 7 Ancient Greek types of love: Eros, Philia, Ludus, Pragma, and Mania, which are romantic love, brotherly love, playful love, practical love, and obsessive love respectively. I also incorporated different flowers with suitable flower meanings surrounding each of the types of love.
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Past and Present to the Future, 2023
Acrylic Paint, Cardboard, Paper, and Hot Glue on Canvas
30.48cm x 30.48cm
I was inspired by Yang Fudong’s Beyond God and Evil — One loves ultimately one's desires, not the thing desired acrylic on inkjet print to combine several pictures into one piece as well as layer paint on top. I wanted to answer the question “What makes a person?” with “Their past experiences and the dreams they have for the future”, so I used pictures from Denver, the city where I was born, to frame a picture I took outside of my current school with a picture of me looking at colleges on top.
Culture and Surroundings, 2024
Fabric paint on fabric, yarn, hot glue, acrylic gems
45.72 cm x 60.96 cm
People have their habits and identity shaped by the cultural context they reside within. I can’t create a universal representation of how culture affects people, so I made this artwork to communicate how I have been shaped growing up as an Asian American. The skirt is my own take on a traditional Mamian skirt. I did some calligraphy in the style of Xu Bing’s Square Word Calligraphy because I found it interesting how he chose to represent the confusion between cultures.