Brazil: Visual Arts exhibit by American School of Brasilia students, a melody for the eyes and the soul

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – Two years into their Visual Arts class the IB students at EAB, the American School of Brasilia, along with a handful Junior IB students took their art into the bustle and bright lights of the capital’s Monumental Axis.

The resulting exposition showed a multitude of creative expressions addressing one essential human quest: Making sense of life and the world through the poetry of artistic visual exploration.

Under the tutelage of the school’s dynamic art director Fiona Murphy, they invaded the tall glass walls of Brasilia’s TV Tower Mezzanine deck and transformed it into an ephemeral museum of their explorations, their art, their obsessions, their mind adventures, their unsettling thoughts, and beautiful visions.

They presented multiple confrontations with the reality that grinds minds down to the passing hours of everyday life. The students were prolific with their approachable art, pushing past conventions as expected but their collective work added to a spectacular exhibit showing multiple arrays of creative works in a constant conversation.

At points, the exhibit was a screaming song without words: visual music expressing the EAB students’ perspectives on life, time, and place; visual music throbbing and mesmerizing, intense and powerful in a range that enabled visitors to walk about into unknown worlds.

It was loud bossa nova in its feast of detail, its relationship with the senses, its poetry, its full flavor, and in that seduction that kept people lingering long in front of the exhibits, taking in the spectacle of art.

Visual Arts exhibits are a staple of IB programs in international schools, they are strange and marvelous displays of the exploration of human creativity and expression. The 2022 EAB IB Visual Arts Exhibition was extraordinary even by those demanding standards.

Murphy’s students showed up possessing already a highly refined and individuated way of thinking that blossomed under her teaching, presenting a thoughtfully intellectualized selection of self-curated works fitted with the artistic dreams of their minds

Evident was a meticulous creation and organization designed to move the spectator and to cause reflection through a multifaceted, elusive exhibition made up of drawings, paintings, sculptures 3-D prints, graffiti, installation, and other conceptions.

That was a show that could make you smile, leading you through the universe of each student, meeting their works, and finding the young artists entirely immersed in their projects. This, in a way that made you happy for a while, suddenly gazing at your own perceptions and feelings, happy to see such earnest work and pride.

The students exhibited their sketchbooks, notes, and digital portfolios alongside, generously sharing their creative process.

The exhibition celebrated the work of 12 students, seven seniors: Victoria Avelar, Anna Carolinna Costa, Alice Freitas, Alisha Kenny, Amanda Miyano Maluf, Hanania Najhan, and Daphne Ray, and five juniors: Marcelo Baptista, Helena Barros, Chandler Capistrano, Bruna Ligocki, and Glori Miles, presenting themselves to the world with intelligence and complexity in this theater of their creativity.

Their work was a potent reduction of the weight and lightness of life through the eyes of learned youth, and evoked an acute sense of the moments slipping away.

Senior Anna Carolinna curated her exhibit as a diagramed invitation to her mind; using different techniques for making art she explained a close relationship with the architecture of place and its effect on people. Deeply engaged with the Oscar Niemeyer architecture of Brasilia, she takes his forms into abstract representations of the iconic cities of Brazil and sowed an obvious joy when spectators recognized the city in her work.

Daphne Ray, also a senior, brings characters she created for her original comic story to life in marker renderings that reflect the depth of her character development. She uses big and pointed ears, wild eyes, and a tiny snout at the end of a long face to illustrate a breaking point in her piece “Some Dogs go to Hell,” giving a visual voice to the moment. Ray’s control of expressions in her drawings comes across in “The Jackalady,” a character she describes as “a symbol of persistence and feminism.”

Alysha Kenney put the spectator face to face with the emotions and intentions we tend to hide to gain acceptance or approval from others in her acrylic on canvas piece “Pulled Apart.”

A haunting black acrylic and water on paper titled “Ghosts,” by senior Hanania Najhan and chalk and graffiti on wood titled “Spot” by Junior Helena Barros are powerfully uncomfortable in the feelings they elicit and their visually stunning use of black predominantly over other colors.

Making the spectator stop and think about ourselves as individuals and the world we live in, these austere and eerie pieces made an impactful stray into dark art in the exhibit.

Eloquent and beautiful is the encaustic art “Fish out of Scale(s)” also by Barros, giving life to her own desperation in unsettlingly loud color, like music that manages to give you an overwhelmingly ominous feeling like the “gasping for air of a fish out of water.”

To explain the range and depth of this year’s Visual Arts Exhibition by the American School in Brasilia is to explain a performance by a symphony orchestra that takes you away from the normal control of your senses, that inspires you, entertains you, teaches you, and makes you feel out of the ordinary.

The pieces and art students described here are but individual notes in a superb concert where it is the whole orchestra that gives the show its magnificence. Every piece contributed to this extraordinary exhibition.

Take a bird’s eye view of the exhibit.

Having led the making of the visual arts exhibit into a student performance that flowed like a melody and keeping it at a steady pace, Murphy characteristically credits the school Administration Team and IB Coordinator, Dr. Maria Sieve as well as its Communications Team, Maintenance Team, Events Manager Cynthia Lee, Arts Assistant Daniel Sá, and Sugar Robinson from Makerspace for helping students use complex machinery in putting their art pieces together.