Listening To The Ocean by 17-year-old Isabelle Campuzano, San Diego School Of Creative and Performing Arts
SAN DIEGO–Now in its 13th year, MOPA’s Youth Exhibition encourages K-12 students in San Diego County and Tijuana to interpret a topic and submit photographic or video art. This year students responded to the theme of sound.
On view through January 9, 2019, the exhibit is a partnership with La Jolla Music Society to bring together photography and music. The student art tackles musical impacts and looks into ways students perceive sounds. The prompt encouraged an interpretation with little limitation, but we did offer some ideas:
- Musical: What does music look like?
- Scientific: What sounds are natural? What sounds are artificial or man-made?
- Opposites: When does sound conflict?
- Creative/Imaginative: What sounds do you imagine?
- Other: What sounds are important in your home?
After receiving nearly 700 entries, a panel of jurors (professional adults in the fields of art, education, government etc.) selected final works on the basis of creativity and originality, interpretation of theme, quality and artist statement or pitch. The selections range from a black and white photograph of a seemingly angry baby screaming out waah straight into a lens to a collage of magazine cutouts of mouths and of messages policing too much or too little talking.
Artwork categories include the following formats:
- Digital Photography
- Silver Gelatin Prints
- Mixed Media such as collages
- Digital Darkroom photography using digital manipulation
- Video and other photographic processes
“Understanding perception of one sense can sometimes come by synthesizing it using another one of our senses, as is the case of paraphrasing one fine art with the tools of another: poetry to illustrate a dance, musical composition to accompany lyrics or, in this case, photography to interpret music or sound.
For the 13th Annual Youth Exhibition call for submissions we asked students to use visuals that communicated that which they perceive in a sound. How would it look?”
As part of the partnership with the La Jolla Music Society, a few of the selected pieces will also be displayed at the construction site of The Conrad Prebys Performing Arts Center, known as The Conrad, in La Jolla.