There isn’t much time left to see a small exhibition of fresh work by young visual artists in the Martha’s Vineyard Regional High School’s Advanced Placement art course, on display Saturday and Tuesday in the community room at the Oak Bluffs library.
The show offers a rare glimpse of what’s on the minds of five Island teenagers, who have been exploring specific fields of inquiry as they build the art portfolios that will determine their final grade in the college-level class.
Humanity’s impacts on the natural world, the not-always-welcome changes that come with growing up and the daily challenges of living with anxiety and depression are striking themes in the Oak Bluffs show.
“I wanted to capture the effects of deforestation on the planet and its creatures,” writes painter Annalee Hoy in her artist’s statement for a trio of works, including an unframed acrylic on canvas of a majestic blue stag against a green background of what, at second glance, are leafless, stunted trees.
Concern for the environment also runs through the work of painter Sam Folts, whose dystopian acrylic on canvas Flying Fish combines elements of cyberpunk, steampunk and Surrealism.
With its moray-eel head, ball-gag bridle and desperately staring eye, this armored fish could swim through a Hieronymus Bosch hellscape without causing a ripple.
Bosch is an evident touchstone for painter and photographer Gabriella DeBlase, whose oil on wood titled Earthly Delights echoes the Renaissance-era fantasist’s most famous and bizarre work, The Garden of Earthly Delights.
Ms. DeBlase’s tribute is less frantic than Bosch’s original, managing to be both serene and unsettling in its depiction of what looks like another planet — or is it our Earth’s future, with a claw-armed mechanism watching over an unpeopled landscape as metal shapes hover in the sky?
“I am examining and experimenting with the relationship between humans and the natural world,” Ms. DeBlase writes of her work, which also includes photography.
Digital painter Nikeya Tankard’s two pieces in the show both work with the color yellow, but they’re otherwise as different as two self-portraits can be.
Walking on Eggs depicts a pair of feet in low socks, tip-toeing through a series of eggy splats on a sky-blue floor with a glistening string of yolk dangling from one heel.
Star Girl is a close-up of the artist’s unsmiling face, her take-no-prisoners gaze highlighted by a cluster of golden stars and surrounded by a wide, daffodil-colored frame.
An acrylic on canvas painting by Annalee Hoy.
— Maria Thibodeau
“These pieces explore the progressions and regressions of becoming an adult,” writes Ms. Tankard.
“Because of their constant relevance in my morning routine throughout all stages of my life, eggs became a continued concept representing this idea of growth and fluctuation,” her statement concluded.
Working in mixed media — chiefly home furnishings and paint — Lux Kisselgof has created three-dimensional expressions of what it’s like to live with depression and anxiety.
Ms. Kisselgof’s interactive piece “what’s even out there?” invites the visitor to draw back a pair of heavy red window curtains, only to see murky and foreboding views beyond the panes.
“The curtains reveal the outside world as a dark and foggy landscape, a place seemingly too dismal and unappealing for someone to voluntarily venture,” writes Ms. Kisselgof, whose other piece in the show is a door with its key chained in place, forever out of reach of the lock.
“The restrained key is meant to represent the way that, even if someone with social anxiety might want to leave their home, their anxiety often holds them back,” she writes.
The Advanced Placement art students’ exhibition is located in the community room on the lower level of the Oak Bluffs library, which is open Saturday from 10 a.m. to 4 p.m. and Tuesday from 10 a.m. to 6 p.m.
