BASE invited Evansville students to create art that best showed what it meant to be a teenager under the Safer At Home orders during COVID-19. Students were encouraged to use whatever medium they could to best convey their feelings on social distancing, isolation or staying at home. Students also needed to write an artist statement that helped describe the artwork, connected it to the theme and allowed our judges to understandwith the artist.
The top 3 entries took home cash prizes for their submissions. 1st place won $100, 2nd place won $50 and 3rd place won $25! Thank you to everyone who entered, shared our contest and helped judge!
Please view our great entries below!
10th grade at Evansville High School
Artist Statement:
Hi my name is Megan Klinger and I am currently a sophomore at Evansville High School. I am 16 years old who has always loved expressing myself through art. What inspired this piece for BASE’s Safer At Home Art Contest, in particular, is not the physical aspects of my life as a teenager in quarantine – as that would be quite boring for me in all honesty. To me, I wanted to create an image that represented not only my own feelings, but many other teenagers’ during quarantine. Before this, I had finally began to feel happy in general. I loved going to school everyday to see my friends and teachers everyday, even if school wasn’t always the easiest it was made better by them. I had the musical, prom, and the graduation of my friends to look forward to this spring, and having everything seemingly stripped away all of the sudden was difficult to say the least. From my own personal experience, mental health has been one that has reached a range of degrees, with being down sometimes in the darkest of places. In this piece, I wanted to illustrate and bring awareness to the impact coronavirus has had on the emotional and mental wellbeing of us teenagers. As an only child, I often feel even more disconnected from those around me in this quarantine, alone and isolated as represented by the entrapment within the hourglass. And in being in that hourglass, you do not know how long this will continue until normality will return. You can only see as the sand collectively gathers around you, immersing you until you can no longer withstand it. This can be left up to interpretation as to what, specifically, that is for each person. For me, the sand could represent my own self-destructive thoughts building up and consuming me whole until I seemingly break when all the sand is poured. I hope that in this piece, even if this is not how you interpret it, everyone is able to get a sense of relatability of the feelings it may invoke.
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10th grade at Evansville High School
Artist Statement:
Being a teenager during quarantine sucks. You have to think of creative ways to waste your time cooped up in your house for weeks on end. Originally, I was going to make the theme a bit darker because it’s hard to be happy right now, but I can also say with confidence that this time is the most creative I’ve been since 8th grade. Singing to myself in pajamas at 3 in the morning has inspired me to write some of my own and make art based around a lyric from some of my favorite songs. Music makes me smile and I have a lot of fun listening to it while I’m jamming out. In terms of my own skill set and taste, this was definitely a bolder and more risky piece for me. I’m not used to the mediums I used, nor the amount of color this piece includes. To add on to that, I have never spent this kind of time on something before. But I love how it turned out. Music is the splash of color in a rather bleak time. It’s a light in the dark. It’s my light.
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7th grade at JC McKenna Middle School
Artist Statement:
In this artwork, I used colored pencil, charcoal pencil, watercolor, acrylic paint and sharpie maker. I drew a teenage girl imagining some fun activities that she likes to do by herself in quarantine, like reading and playing the piano, along with some things she finds frustrating, like all of the awareness for germs and sickness lately. I added color to show that we can use our free time now a days to be more creative and thoughtful.
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6th grade, homeschooled
Artist Statement:
Through this rough time you can’t do much. Day’s are so much longer and it gets boring at home. You can’t play with friends, go to school, go shopping, eat out, get books at the library, etc. My picture shows how the city looks these day’s. Empty. The teenager in my picture is when everything shut down and no one is out anymore. She was going to the thrift store but as she walked she realized everything was empty, no one was out, and everything is closed. My picture is gray because this is a hard time and you can not do anything. There is no one but the girl because no one is out anymore and you can not do anything when you do go into town. This is teenage life. Not being able to do anything, see friends, go to stores, and so much more.
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9th grade at Evansville High School
Artist Statement:
My photograph I chose for the Art Contest depicts a scene from my home farm. It is a photograph of one of our barns that is old and weathered. We don’t know how much longer this barn might last and when it no longer exists, it will be time to rebuild. Just like this barn we don’t know how long the pandemic will last. As we wait for it to end we are beginning to rebuild a new normal. While that happens I have felt safe at home and spent much of my time doing school work, chores, and what I really love, art. Although I feel stressed at times, being at home gives me a new appreciation for what I have today and hope for what tomorrow will bring.
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