Joyce Tsui 

The chaos that runs rampant around and within us is often overlooked in sacrifice for comfort. Awareness of these conflicts can bring empathy and hope towards a better future with improvements. Through my paintings, I aim to open people’s eyes to the societal issues and internal struggles of the current state of our world that many refuse to acknowledge, like the acid attacks against Middle Eastern women. My work also draws from my personal experiences, starting from when I was once part of the 2.8 million adolescents in America who have experienced depression. Exploring and acknowledging repressed thoughts provided me resolution, as it showed we are not alone in these tormenting moments. I currently portray other aching aspects of my life such as the pressure on unmarried Asian woman in 剩女: Leftover Women. While I grapple with conflicts, I hope to bring perspective and awareness with my art and evoke an emotional response to build empathy.        

As I continue to illustrate in the coming decades, my artwork will then serve as a catalog that recorded past hardships such as the 2020 Australian Wildfires. I strive to depict my and others’ stories of pain, something inherently intangible and distasteful. Yet, anguish can be realized and made intriguing within visual imagery. My artwork asks viewers to temporarily reject their instinct of staying within their comfort zone and become open towards creating a connection with others by engaging in their experience.

Lulu Octeau

Is who I am and I am a 4th year graduating CCS art major in painting and drawing. I am fascinated with linework and very good paintings of cats. I am a junk magnet. I love Stuff: seed pods and weird beads and string. I use these things to make friends and decorate. I've been painting bugs I see in the community garden. I think it is important to get close to the ground and look at the dirt. Watercolor, ink, and pen are my most used medias. I also make comics that relate to my interests in fairytales and ghosts and building very large worlds in my head. My current longform comic is called Milo and I have a website that I use to post it online. It is luluocteau.com.

Alex Schwartzberg

When I began my time at UCSB, I was convinced that I had to make a point with my art. That every piece had to be a carefully constructed metaphor with a larger goal of convincing or educating the viewer. As time went on and I learned more about artistic techniques, I became less focused on trying to articulate a clear symbolic message and more on sensations. I’m easily moved by everyday occurrences: a glimpse into an apartment window, a brief potential connection with a stranger, or just a ray of light hitting a corner in a certain way can make me disproportionately emotional. In my paintings and other artwork, I’ve been exploring ways to capture these moments and hopefully impart a fraction of the feeling that I get from them.

Another theme that’s become more prominent in my art over the
last four years is technology. Two of my paintings, Amtrak and Delta Airlines, were painted entirely digitally in Photoshop. My digital projects, which are linked as videos, explore the connection between the physical world and more abstract digital visuals. Ghost Town and Under Construction are both collage-based works that use graphics from archived Geocities websites. These old websites are a longtime fascination of mine, since most of them are remnants of amateur
sites created in the early days of the Internet, and seeing them still functional and unchanging is a little like bumping into a ghost on
the street. Finding an album full of a stranger’s wedding photos was particularly strange and exciting for me, and I wanted to memorialize it in an even more permanent physical way in Under Construction.

During my time here, I’ve learned so much not only about artmaking, but also about seeing the world in a different way. I hope that my artworks can open a new window for you as well, even if it’s a small one.

Eliana Lechter

My work is inspired by my surroundings: the people and places I am familiar with, see every day, and love. My environment and my experiences are the basis of my art; I recreate scenes that are meaningful to me, presenting my interpretation of a memory to the viewer. Isla Vista, California, has served as my home for the past three years and I aim to reflect its qualities in my artwork to depict why it is so special to me. My work portrays the interplay between humans, their creations, and nature, showing how we have shaped our surroundings and continue to influence the natural landscape around us. I like to explore natural environments interrupted by a human presence, such as a figure in water or architecture within a larger landscape. Contrasting elements are used to accentuate the interaction, like straight lines versus dynamic shapes or textured versus flat forms. Some areas of the paintings are highly detailed, with every leaf on a palm frond individually painted, juxtaposed with the flat shape of a building or the solid, uninterrupted color of the sky. Recently I have taken an interest in architecture, painting the houses I have lived in in Isla Vista as well as different locations in Santa Barbara.

In my most recent paintings I have ventured into exploring color and light. In 6518, the presence of the sun is indicated through its projection of light on the house. The subtleties in tone in the white paint from warm to cool distinguish the light from the shadow and allow the viewer to see the true effect of golden hour sun. The eaves underneath the roof emerge from the shadows as they are enveloped in the warm light of the sun. In Purple House, a similar effect is being shown as the sun’s warm light reflects on one house, but not the other, as one has a bright pink light and the other is a cool purple color. Purple and yellow are used to complement one another, making the sunset shine brighter because it is framed by the purple houses.

The goal of my work is to present the world through my eyes to my viewer. I concentrate on themes that evoke feelings of happiness and peace for myself, hoping that the viewer will feel the same way. I want to give a glimpse of my environment to the world, either showing them something they are unfamiliar with or something that they can relate to. My paintings are straightforward, conveying my message through a simple composition and meaningful color combinations. I strive to transport the viewer to a different location through my paintings, offering serenity, stillness, and brightness.

Natalia Spritzer

I use different media such as oil paint, oil pastel, acrylic, and collage to establish relationships between different aspects of my paintings and drawings. After I have chosen a particular set of media, I can start constructing a narrative for the painting or drawing. My interests in applied psychology and education drives an investigative lens into transforming my experiences of childhood and trauma into visual works. Together, the digital and the analog methods I use allow me to integrate personal symbolic themes and juxtapose these with the narrative. The media and the narrative have a purposeful and mutually dependent relationship by interlocking form and content.

The media I select for each work activates a visceral response in me and in my audience, building the narrative or content of the pieces. I am influenced in both my life and art by my personal psychological and mental state, and I derive the physicalization of emotions in relation to a specific point in my life. In one of my works, the point of departure begins within my family culture, where “negative” emotional expression (depression, anxiety, sadness etc.) is invalidated and repressed. To some extent, my art has served as a therapeutic measure to express emotion through my own symbolic language, with some pieces entirely dedicated to validating my psychological battles. The ugly nut that came from me is focused on a surgery I had as a child that later went on to effect my reproductive health. This piece anchors my anxiety, fear, and frustration in corporeal form through a jagged and disconnected fire halo in the background. The scribbled or uncontrolled etching in this work is an attempt to connect with my childhood memory as an adult because I did not know how to express my emotional pain that was a consequence of the surgery. I am interested in displaying the intertwined relationship these emotions share as I experience them through symbolic language. For example, in my piece Eated, a fight goes on behind my self-portrait: Anxiety and Perseverance appear as a clown and a scorpion, battling for dominance. Corporeally manifesting emotion is an investigative technique channeled through marks on a canvas or pixels through a screen. By equipping different materials without limitations, I broaden the opportunity for haptic emotional expression.

Through the increased relevancy of technology in our lives, both negative and positive, due to the pandemic and to the constant stream of upgrades pre and post pandemic, I involve my work in artificial or man-made digital softwares, including Photoshop, AI, and Blender. I’m interested in how these systems collaborate with the human psyche as artificial intelligence. I have used this collaboration as another form of personal expression by including the software in my emotional process as I worked. In the series The Circumstantial Paintings, I used software programs to render photographs of myself in different poses, changing the color gradient of each photograph in connection to a “feelings code.” The feelings code associates each color of the gradient to a particular emotion. The process of this work involved painting the emotion I felt most intensely from the photographs for an hour each day until I had completed the entirety of my form.

I seek, mix, and fuse my symbolic language to juxtapose with the narrative of each piece. My symbolic language is a personal and untranslatable shield to uphold the works’ partial purpose as therapeutic expression or exercise. I aim to manipulate these symbols in humorous, monstrous, or deranged ways. I want to tempt the viewer to question the original visual form of our everyday interactions with both digital and traditional media, through transformation or abjection, to arrive at imagery closer to what is real to me. The abjection of the imagery and symbols that I integrate into my work are part of my symbolic language.

I am influenced by figurative artists, by abstract Surrealism and the Symbolist movement. I am especially inspired by how mixed media artists like Kiki Smith, Louise Bourgeois, Kara Walker and Marium Agha integrate symbolic themes in order to express difficult and raw ideas about the human experience. These artists and their art have influenced my work to encourage confessional and confrontational, easing my expression of repressed memories and emotions. These artists challenge taboos and selfhood, reducing the ego that is attached to the human form. Through abjection and Surrealist strategies, these artists have made room for confronting our basic human experiences such as trauma, natural bodily functions, and the agency of the female experience and body. Such works are largely relevant to me. What I create is my personal art therapy which I hope will relate to the experiences and feelings of others as well.

Allison Hale

The artwork I’m sharing in homebodyheartthrob was created during and is about the covid-19 pandemic while thinking about isolation and how it affects my relationships with myself and with others. these pieces consider themes including making the private space public, the exploitation of workers, and the preciousness of finding people that love you and you love in return. most of my artwork grapples with ideas relating to gender identity and societal expectations and stereotypes in that realm.