Title

Water Fight

Creator

Mia Truman, Ursinus College

Preview

Student Exhibition Year

2020

Description

Oil on wood painting of three children having a play battle with water guns and balloons, inspired by photographs from the artist’s childhood. Presented as part of the 2020 Annual Student Exhibit in the Berman Museum of Art at Ursinus College.

Dimensions

14 x 19 inches

Artist Statement

“Little girls are cute and small only to adults. To one another they are not cute. They are life sized.” - Margaret Atwood, Cat’s Eye (1988)

My paintings are based on photographs taken from my childhood that I have collected from my parents and friends. I am interested in exploring the complexity of childhood relationships, memories associated with childhood, and the perception of these relationships by adults. Children are often underestimated by adults, and childhood is sometimes thought of as a “simpler” time. But children’s relationships can be as complicated and stressful as adults’. In these paintings, photos from my childhood are used as a conduit to explore this complexity and its perception.

For this exhibition, I explore how childhood relationships may be perceived from within the relationship vs from an outside observer. In the larger paintings, I looked for photos where children were interacting with the camera in a menacing or challenging way, positioning the life-size figures at eye level and allowing for an uneasy confrontation between subject and viewer. I was inspired by Atwood’s words and wanted to visually put the viewer into the place of a child who is interacting with their peers. The smaller paintings take an opposite approach. I searched for photographs where the children had their backs turned to the camera. I want the viewer to look at these scenes in the context of the larger paintings and question what they are seeing.

The work also explores memory and nostalgia in the perception of one’s own memories. When we remember a moment, especially from childhood, our memory is shaped and distorted by emotions. Although the work is based on photographs, I added and changed colors, edited or blurred the background, and cut people out of the photographs to convey this distortion.

Comments

Recipient of the Berman Award. The faculty of the Ursinus College Department of Art and Art History selects this award for artistic achievement.

Rights Statement

Copyright of the underlying work is held by the artist. The digital image presented here is for educational purposes only and is not for commercial use.

Creative Commons License

This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-No Derivative Works 4.0 International License.