Gallery
"Our Stall" by Jade Abrera
My piece is titled "Our Stall." It uses a digital medium, and portrays two students sharing a bathroom stall. I created this piece with the help of a few reference images to help with dimensions, and used the program Procreate. I chose a more pastel color scheme, as I associate those hues with memories and the past. The overall theme is queerness in all-girl's Catholic schools, and I wanted to depict the secretive nature of relationships. Obviously being openly queer in a Catholic school is not an option. So, the secluded nature of a bathroom stall becomes a place where students can spend time together. I wanted this piece to portray innocence and fun. While the bigger picture is a sad thing to witness, intimate moments like this make for such special memories. A detail in this work I like the most is the cross right outside of the stall the two girls are sharing. The looming feeling of God constantly watching brings a weight to Catholic guilt.
by Sara Chouhan
This is a digital drawing showcasing the structure of a classroom from an all-girls Catholic school, as shown in details such as the cross, the small paintings of Jesus and Mary on the wall, and the room being filled with only girls. To give a hint on our group’s theme of “being queer,” I chose to focus on two particular students, who happily converse with each other while other girls are busy doing their school work. I also made the sunlight from the windows shining on only the two of them (to emphasize more on their relationship) while the other parts of the classroom are left slightly dark. I used Procreate on my iPad since it is one of the best apps for digital art, having flexible palettes, brushes, and color recommendations.
by Nikki Gabuya
The rainbow sunglasses symbolizes concealing their sexual identity. The other religious things symbolize the model’s religious orientation.
* Images used are from Canva.
by Larissa Joya
This artwork was created in the app ‘Minecraft.’ It was quite fitting to use the app for creating the artwork as it has always been a medium for people to build anything they can imagine. It is especially a good tool for building architectural structures—in this case, a confessional. This confessional looks like any other confessionals you would see in a Roman Catholic church, except it has a rainbow bursting out of one of the booths. Following the theme “growing up queer in an all-girls Catholic school,” this artwork represents the internal struggles of one who experiences this. Catholic schools usually make students confess their sins to a priest regularly, which explains the confessional. The rainbow coming out from one of the booths represents the Catholic ideology that being queer (having romantic feelings for the same sex, specifically) is a sin. It essentially translates a story of a queer student who is taught that being queer is a sin and that one should “not become like them.” So, she confesses this to a priest, believing that she has sinned and should “let it out of her body” to be cleansed of it.
"Prying Eyes" by Angelina Mantala
Installation art pieces are interesting because in order to get the full experience, one needs to actually be there – to interact with it themselves. And it isn't like painting or scultures, it's whole environments that can be entered, exited, walked through, etc. Recreating that digitally would've been tough and so I settled for the next best thing: a website that emulates point-and-click video games in order to preserve the interactive nature of installation pieces. Clicking on key items in each room triggers text boxes that reveal more of the story. Keeping in line with the theme of "being queer in an all-girls Catholic school", the story each page tells follows the prejudice faced by a Catholic lesbian girl, leading to her no longer feeling welcome in places she used to consider home (such as the church of her religion and even the house she lives in). She only truly feels at home when she is with her girlfriend who is also her classmate. Their story doesn't truly end, and it will take a very long time before they are truly accepted by others – but one thing is for certain, they will always have each other.
* Click on the image above or over here to visit the site. All key items to be pressed are animated except for the one in the Church room.
by Ciara Russegger
This is a digital illustration focusing on the comfort room as a “place” within an all girls’ Catholic school—except it’s not exactly an all girls’ school in practice. The human subject of the illustration is, as he sees himself in the mirror, a boy; thus the literal place of a public restroom (an oft-gendered place) in an all girls' school are causes of tension with his figurative "place" in life. Much of the location is cast in lurid shadow, while the boy is well-illuminated in blue, white, and pink.