By Leah Lewis
Photos by Kyle Sirman
From April 15th to April 18th, three CA Visual Art (CAVA) students displayed their art in the Willow School’s CAVE Gallery. James Trotter, Patrick Volner, and Riley Ruth, three of the fourteen level IV CAVA seniors this year, were featured, all putting a year’s planning into a successful Senior Show.
A Senior show for CAVA students is where level IV CAVA seniors get to have their own art show where they exhibit their own art pieces. Each student comes up with an original concept that the show follows. Their shows are located in the CAVE Gallery where any Willow staff and student can view.
This year’s CAVA IV seniors spent the past year creating senior shows that highlight their family, friends, culture, and design. These students worked up to developing their own distinctive style that they have constructed through their high school art career.
“Looking at their work reveals some of the stuff that’s under the surface,” Willow visual arts teacher Kyle Sirman said, “the deeper thoughts and emotions that they all [avoid] talking about in their day to day life.”
James Trotter – Yard Conservation
Trotter brought the old to new in his art showcase. The artist used charcoal, paint, and other mediums to repurpose objects he found. The rebranding of the object entailed painting over it with different figures. These figures in these pieces are people connected in some way to Trotter, whether that be family, friend, or a Mardi Gras flag carrier, thus giving these recycled objects a whole new life and aesthetic.
“When I find items at antique stores or yard sales that are old and really interesting but hold no practical value beyond their coolness,” Trotter said, “I think there is no better thing to do than repurpose it into a new creation.”
Patrick Volner – Really Makes You Think, Huh?
From the title to the quirky images, Volner’s silly personality is heavily portrayed through his artwork. This artist used the things surrounding him such as music, classmates, friends, and life experiences as inspiration. One of the key concepts that Volner’s showcase juggles with is the idea of creating “meaningless” art that has meaning.
Volner best describes this by saying, “The idea that people would derive meaning from one of my pieces that was far deeper than any intentional meaning was funny to me. So, I would put vague phrases and meaningless sentences in at times. However, even the meaningless sentences still had meaning.”
Evident in each piece of artwork in Volner’s show is the importance of having fun with art. This blends in with the variety of vibrant colors, mixing of styles, and wonky figures that every single piece contains.
Riley Ruth – Can You Remember?
Artist Riley Ruth took a different approach to her senior show by framing it around personal fading memories. Ruth’s pieces are disoriented in forms of coloring (the unnatural blue light in the kitchen in her bigger art piece), stippling, and painted pixels. Ruth’s puzzle-like artworks are all connected together because of the disoriented forms. This successfully signaled to viewers Ruth’s concept of memories that are fading.
“The pixelated and incomplete paintings along with the stippled drawings make you think about how memories can become blurry and fragmented as we remember them,” Ruth said. “Each piece has an element that’s missing. However, turning them into pieces of art immortalizes them in some way.”
These 2024 CAVA seniors have come a long way from their first year in CA Visual Arts, from learning the basics of artistry to mastering and presentsenting their own art show. They tackle themes where they express their teen years and life experiences visually through their artwork and have even generated their own close-knit bond between each other.
“I love my classmates in CAVA IV,” Volner said. “The class has become its own little community, and everyone in it supports each other and what they’re doing. It has been such a great aspect of my life in high school, and it is by far what I’m going to miss most about high school next year.”
