Otis Crowder

“What is your favorite artwork?”

Curatorial Rationale

The works in my exhibition express the frustrations that I have with different forms of authority, and they question the validity of any institution’s exercise of power. I hope to represent the hypocrisy and wrongdoings of powerful entities such as schools, politicians, medicine, and conventional wisdom. With these representations, I can convey the importance of retaining self-worth and questioning authority, so that malicious parties do not steal from us valuable time, joy, or personal experiences. These artworks characterize the pursuit of concrete answers and fair treatment from these institutions as a creative and valiant endeavor. By using 3D techniques and whimsical styles, the artworks come to life to create vivid images that emphasize their ultimate message of challenging authority. My vision for presenting this body of work is for all of these pieces to contribute to an overall exhibition with a formidable but vibrant look, so that the themes of authority and creativity can radiate from the exhibition.

Each artwork in the exhibition focuses on a certain type of authority that I find to be harmfully exercised, and they are all intended to explain how that misuse of power strips people of their individuality and takes away their opportunities to find happiness. “I Didn’t Study For This,” for example, questions a common assertion that some things can be art while others cannot. By portraying this perspective as crude and misplaced, I celebrate the endless modes of making art that the universe has to offer while also questioning the initial claim that rejects those modes. The contrasts of bright and dull colors, as well as more organic and more impersonal shapes throughout these artworks participate in expressing the conflicts between individual purpose and authority.

The composition of my exhibition sorts my 3D pieces from smallest to largest, allowing each piece to stand out on its own and create a message using its own merits. Instead of arranging the pieces with focus on how they balance each other out, my intention is for each to be viewed as a singular important point in the evolution of the exhibition’s theme, in the same way that a timeline will list each important event individually as they combine to tell a common story. With this layout, each separate piece’s message is able to shine, and an audience can reflect on the questions that each artwork asks about their own forms of authority.

Otis’s Artwork

  • 64 x 76 x 12

    Acrylic Paint on Cardboard and Mixed Media with Pencils, Cotton Balls, Chain, etc.

    64 cm x 76 cm x 12 cm

    In the USA, the average retirement age is 64, the average life expectancy is 76, and the difference between those two numbers is 12 years. This feels to me like a sorrowfully short amount of time to be living life without the pressures and commitments of employment, especially since our bodies are worn down at old age. To express my worries, I created a drab elevator that leads its rider up to a 12-step escalator adorned with scary imagery that takes them straight back to where they came from.

  • Stranded Disposables

    Mixed Media with Wood, Scrap Metal, Thread, and Disposable Camera Pictures

    36 cm x 26cm x 28cm

    In this artwork, it was my intention to depict the isolating nature of social media, although meant to bring people and communities together. To do this, I placed a broken camera on a deserted island surrounded by pictures of social media profiles that it took. In this way, I can express that we are inaccurate and alienated versions of ourselves behind a camera. I used scrap material as well as destructive techniques in the sculpture to create a more dangerous and worn-down look to it.

  • Putting the Cart Before the Horse

    Acrylic Paint on Cardboard and Mixed Media with Paper Mache, Air-Dry Clay, and Nasal Spray, Bottle, etc.

    19 cm x 15 cm x 17 cm

    For this artwork, I intended to express comedic but real frustration that I have for my school’s reaction to a fight that broke out on campus, namely calling for a lockdown. Their communication was contradictory and confusing, leading to panic across the campus and fear for a shooter. I depicted this with a well-known idiom, a standard of a paradox on a sticky note, and many pieces of symbolism surrounding fights. Still, this piece is also just a fun and whimsical image.

  • Clockwork Clarinet

    Mixed Media with Paper Mache, Wire, Air-dry Clay and Magazine

    34 cm x 40 cm x 42 cm

    This artwork takes inspiration from the “clockwork flute,” a made-up instrument from a song lyric that reminds me that even the most unreal ideas can be brought into reality with imagination. It was my intention to combine rigid and “proper” elements, such as clarinets and gears, with whimsical ideas, such as roller skating and the color pink, and to put these elements in distress to convey my frustration with the fact that silliness is so poorly incorporated into the greater world.

  • Otard's Dystonia : Androids to Stay

    Mixed Media with Cardboard and Watercolor

    36 cm x 51 cm x 51 cm

    To comment on the increasing replacement of human creativity with AI created media, I constructed a pure-white mechanical hand that lazily puppeteers a painfully contorted human hand that is bathed in conflicting color. This reflects on the effort and emotion put into human-made art that signifies its value; elements that are much more rarely in AI art. Cotard’s syndrome is a condition in which you believe your body to be dead or not your own, and dystonia is a medical term for writer’s cramp.

  • I Didn't Study For This

    Acrylic on Canvas

    30.48 cm x 40.64 cm

    With this artwork, I mirrored the painting style of Koko The Gorilla to challenge the idea of what can and cannot be art. While I believe that everything can be art, others find pieces like Koko’s paintings to be too abstract, unskilled, or unintentional to qualify. By placing this painting in a museum, I intended to argue that their view is too narrow, and that art is not a strict discipline that needs studying to understand.

  • Rorschach

    Acrylic Paint on Canvas

    22.86 cm x 30.48 cm

    I made this abstract painting to question the use of the Rorschach inkblot test in the justice system, as the method is argued to be unreliable and very prone to bias, and has a history of being used to make diagnoses outside of a reasonable scope, like homosexuality. I intended to challenge how this, or any test could be used to make consequential judgements on one’s character by painting a small, drab inkblot in the middle of a vibrant phantasmagoria meant to symbolize a complex human mind.

  • ReRoll!

    Mixed Media with Cardboard, Acrylic, and Plastic

    17.15 cm x 17.15 cm x 55.88 cm

    By drawing from the style of the familiar head, torso, and leg-scrambling toy found on many playgrounds, my intention with this artwork is to draw attention to the tendency of politicians, celebrities and lawmakers to combine the struggles of a wide variety of societally marginalized groups into single broad and vague statements. I feel that their sentiments often don’t shed accurate enough light on any one issue, and are very poor supplements to real dedicated actions.