Ever-Growing
A girl receives a kind message from a friend offering support. “Our main message is that the journey of bettering your mental health will never end and can always improve. It is ever-growing,” the filmmakers shared.
jrowe
Lost
A girl struggling at school sits down with a friend who shares his positive experience with talking to a counselor.
Destition: Movie
“Destition: Movie shows how film can be a temporary escape from reality.”
Warm Embrace
“Warm Embrace is an artwork I created where there are two people coming together for a hug and there is a caring moment between the two.”
The Eyes
“My piece is about the feeling of vulnerability and social anxiety, about how it feels for me when I try to pass off that I’m fine and how I feel like anything I do, people will judge me, as if all eyes are on me.”
Growing Flower Tree
“During the transition of coming back to school (in-person), I felt I lost my sense of balance which set me and my plants to wilt and burn a bit. Something that helped me bring back hope for the future was speaking affirmative words and phrases before leaving home and starting anything new.”
The Golden Fields
“The meaning of the piece represents prejudice and stereotypes always following the individual in the portrait, the individual being Hispanic and Latino. Instead of letting these stereotypes control their life the person keeps walking through the twists and turns of life’s road.”
Recovering
My painting “Recovering” is about my anchor. Last year after coming back to school and getting involved with several school activities, I had some problems with mental health- overthinking stuff, getting pressured, not maging my time wisely- so I had to find a way to go back and make an anchor. As I was working on this art piece, I thought about what my anchor is and how I use it. Since I thought that I needed to focus and concentrate on my studying and academics, I chose studying as my anchor and started using my schoolwork to help me refocus and give myself a sense of accomplishment.
Why We Fight
My entry is about the recent overturning of Roe V. Wade. On the canvas, there is a television playing a news coverage of a protest fighting against the overturning. The people protesting look upset and are all holding signs with pro-choice designs. There is a woman intently watching the screen looking slightly unkempt with bandages. This ties into the theme of justice I was going for, where even if you are not able to persolly be there, you can still watch others fight for the same cause. With a constant barrage of bad news in today’s media, it’s easier to feel desensitized and pretend like it doesn’t affect you. A lot of people don’t understand the repercussions of such a case being overturned or who it affects. Even if Roe V. Wade being reversed doesn’t affect you, it can harm the people around you and takes away women’s rights to make healthcare decisions for themselves. You never know when something like this could affect family or friends—it hurts everybody. Understandably, there are a lot of circumstances that would prevent someone from being able to fight for themself. The good thing about this world is that there are still people willingly putting themselves out there despite all odds to fight for everybody, both for you and me. I felt like a protest was a great example of this message.
Runner
With this piece, my goal was to show a runner escaping a cluster of chaotic things. Running has been my “anchor” over the past few months, so I decided to have the person running away from the sort of nonsensical, disorganized madness that, without an anchor, can really leave people detached from what matters. I painted the runner fairly small because it allowed the overwhelmingness of all of the stuff behind it to show through, while also setting them in front of the objects to give the idea of an escape. I also used night and day to represent the more chaotic aspects of the right side of the painting and the calm of the left.