PCC’s annual student art gallery

On Friday, April 15, PCC’s annual Student Art Gallery opened with the theme “A Room Of Unrelated Things.” The exhibition consisted of some of the projects that they worked on throughout the spring semester. Some of the students felt eager and anxious about having their work up in the gallery. Some felt ecstatic to finally present their art.

“It was like a really good experience to be a part of this…” Cameron Monardez said. “There was like some anxiety[..] to actually see your work on the wall and to be shown off— its very cool”

The gallery pieces were all unique, creating a broader sense of individuality through each artist being a shared space. None of the pieces looked alike, a first look into the concept of “A Room Of Unrelated Things.”Some of the pieces were colorful, others were more darker in its theme. Each art really transcended the artist’s personality, identity, and passion.These artists ranged from those who had been making art for years to those who had discovered a new interest and chose to pursue it.

The art gallery’s location and presentation were both attractive and eye-catching. By the work of their paintings, each artist seemed to have a different perspective of what art meant to them, leaving the entire exhibition with a youthful and innocent perspective.

Kelly Harwell, explored her definition of art and decided to do works on the current state of the world, with one of her art pieces titled, Pandemic. This piece is a drawing of the city during the Covid-19 epidemic with many thought-bubbles of what people would have heard or said during the lockdown, but no one in sight and the city looking like a ghost town.

“It was actually in 2021, and they were some of my reflections on the pandemic,” Harwell said. “The empty ghost town is just about isolation but this feeling of being together in it, yet still feeling alone— It was just a lot of pressure and fear in that piece”.

Her following piece was a self portrait of herself through a zoom lens in which she looks very relaxed without shoes that demonstrate a causal feel in an office like room.

“It’s actually a self portrait and I’m considering ambivalence, I was feeling about my work in 2020 it kinda through the lens of a zoom screen”, Harwell said.

With the closure of colleges across California in early March, concerns arose about what the new normal would look like and what it meant for online learning.College students’ life changed throughout the pandemic in terms of how they received higher education.

“It was a lot of meeting online and feeling a sense of loss but then also still wanting to work hard so it’s a mix of trying and not giving a care,” Harwell laughed. “Those were the feelings I was thinking about when I came up with that piece”.

Her final image titled, Another Day Inside, featured a little black cat merged with other pandemic-related paintings. In the piece, the cat looks to be moving and twisting its body. It appeared to be a fairly regular behavior for a cat, therefore it was intriguing why the artist chose to capture and create that piece.

“I started drawing my cat a lot,” Harwell said. “The black and white of the cat is being silly like another day inside but a cat she’s always inside was a way to light up things. [This was] to add some humor to the heavy moments.”

The art gallery transformed every student’s vision and idea into a physical product. It created an atmosphere that embodied every artist’s pieces in their own different ways. Each piece was unique, many were creative, and gave the audience a peak into their artistic perspective.