This piece is a way to introduce the three main characters and get a sense for the aesthetic and themes of the story. I wanted to show them together in a composition that is similar to more traditional artwork and then use the surrounding area to show the mix of beauty and horror that I want to show in my series and my work as a whole. The three characters are unnamed but are a boy (center), his best friend (left), and the most popular and intelligent girl in their class (right). They are all in their last year of school.

This piece is about grief, but is also about in general the commodification of emotion and the vulnerability of being in public or having your worst moments broadcast to everyone. In the society I created, I think it would be more common for this to happen and so you’d feel like you’re drowning and have no way to express your emotions privately.

This piece is about the expectation placed on people, especially young people, to function normally when there are bad things happening in the world. A lot of the time, you’re constantly being bombarded with tragedies in society or in your personal life, but there’s still the expectation that you just ignore that and focus on yourself which is exactly what causes those tragedies in the first place.

All pieces are 12’ by 16’ (#14 is 16’ by 12’ and #2 is 12’ by 15’) and made digitally using Procreate.

My sustained investigation is a series of pieces that tell a story about growing up and learning the harsh truths of the world through the view of youth in situations that become twisted and disturbing over time. It will cover themes of apathy, sexuality, and dishonesty in a world that is a darker mirror of our own. ​

The first piece introduced the characters, and with this one I wanted to show more of the world that they live in. The story takes place in the near future in an alternate, dystopian version of the world that is overtaken with meat and is ruled by a government that has extreme divides between childhood and adulthood. Everything is commercialized, and everyone is under surveillance to ensure that they don’t learn anything about being an adult before they’re allowed to be one.

This piece is sort of about the feelings of temptation to do bad things. I wanted to use grapes as a symbol of that because in the Greek myth of Tantalus it’s often said that there were grapes hanging over his head in the afterlife but they would move away after he tried to reach for them. Even as someone who hasn’t been given many opportunities to do bad things, there’s always a temptation to engage in those behaviors because they seem interesting even if they are risky.

This piece is about toxic masculinity and how it affects young men and their mental health. I was inspired by the fact that suicide related deaths and mental health issues are at an all time high in male dominated college classes and the professors and administrators do not help because they are also affected by the toxic standards.

This piece is about the darker side of falling in love/getting a crush on someone. I think it’s easy to put a false image onto someone you like, and see them in a brighter light than they actually are. Sometimes, this is innocent and doesn’t cause problems, but often it leads to issues when your idealized image of that person doesn’t match up with their actions or emotions. I wanted to convey that in this piece by showing the outer image of the girl that he sees and then her real appearance, which isn’t ugly but is more realistic and looks sad.

This piece is about being exposed to adult topics from a young age and the feeling of violation from learning about things that you can’t unlearn. It’s an experience I think most people can relate to, especially in the age of the internet where children often end up stumbling on adult content unintentionally and learning about those things earlier than they should.

This piece is about compulsive self-harming tendencies that happen every day, like biting cuticles or lips. I struggle with this a lot, so I wanted to make a piece that showed the intensity of it and the regret after doing something absently that ends up being painful and inconvenient.

This piece is about losing contact with the real world in favor of digital media and entertainment and ending up feeling like your life is less real than what’s on the screen. I often find myself getting caught up in things happening online and I feel like my life pales in comparison and isn’t as interesting.

This piece is about wanting to understand oneself and what makes people treat you badly. I personally have had a lot of instances where people who I considered my friends ended up changing their opinion of me over time or I discovered that they had never liked being around me. It makes me want to know what about me makes me unlikeable and what it is that they’re annoyed by. I don’t really understand it.

This piece is about solitude in numbers, both on a personal level and on a larger scale. For me personally, it represents my experience after a traumatic event where I felt very alone and like nobody else felt how I did about it. More widely, it’s about the idea of your negative feelings about the world seeming to be unique, and how they isolate you when you feel like nobody else cares as much as you do about events.

For the final piece in my investigation, I made one that is about hope and being able to look forward. The parts of Mu from the past are still there, and are not gone, but they have come together to create her final self. She is able to move on and approach the world with a new view.

This piece is about complexity and the difficulty of discovering how nuanced the world is. I’ve been upset about that recently because it feels like everything has so many layers and there’s nothing that’s truly black and white which makes it difficult to have a stance on things even though I want to because I first have to consider all of the angles.

This is an example of the thumbnails and concepts I made for my pieces. This concept eventually became piece #14.