LEBANON — Last year’s high school exhibition at AVA Gallery and Art Center included some of the wackier and more amusing art I’ve seen in the Upper Valley.
A painting of a periwinkle ice cream cone heaving with tentacles and bloodshot eyeballs comes to mind, as does the tiny Lorax assembled from 3-D printer scraps nestled among a forest of mini Truffula trees.
There weren’t as many fanciful pieces at the packed Friday opening for this year’s show, which was a shame. The work, over 100 pieces from 14 Upper Valley schools, seemed a little tighter, safer. The kind of tidy assignments you’d expect to come out of a high school art class.
Where was the monomania and emotional potency so endemic to the adolescent experience?
It wasn’t all paint-by-numbers. Some artists offered compelling windows into their inner lives, what irked them, what they cared about, how they saw themselves.
So it was in Emilee Hall’s painting “Problems,” where two rats grip the shoulders of a girl whose eyes burn yellow with fright as a third creature falls from the ceiling with arms outstretched, rushing to join its brethren.
Hall is a junior at Stevens High School, one of the schools that’s been feeling the sting of the Claremont School District’s financial crisis.
“There’s a lot of empty classrooms,” Hall, 16, said in an interview at the opening. “We don’t have a lot of paper.”
The school year’s been tough on her mental health and “Problems” speaks to the stress and anxiety she’s been carrying.
“There’s a lot of uncertainty for the kids,” her mother, Melissa Hall, said.
As a parent, it’s hard to look at her daughter’s work and know what she’s going through, but “it’s nice to see her get her feelings out on the canvas,” she said.
Ninth grader Liam Choi’s “Chosen or Choosing Yourself” also reflected on school-related struggles, though at his former school in his home country of South Korea, where he watched the kids in his class abandon their passions in the face of a mounting pile of coursework.
“Most people stop their dreams to study,” he said at AVA.
The desire for something different is part of what led him to enroll at Cardigan Mountain School, the all-boys boarding school in Canaan, as an eighth grader.
“After I came here, I started to draw. I started to play guitar,” he said.
“Chosen,” which won first place in the show’s multiple discipline category, is a testament to that newfound creativity and sense of self.
Made using a mixture of digital, printmaking and collage methods, the piece shows rows of identical students sitting hunched over their desks. They press their forehead into their hands in a gesture of focus, or defeat. Squint your eyes and the students blur against the work’s yellow background, their desks shifting into a series of tessellating cubes.
Disrupting the pattern is a boy who stands to strum a guitar, while a giant hand floats over head, its fingers forming a pinching shape as if to pluck one of the students from their chair.
Liam modeled the arm after his own.
“Choosing myself is more important than being chosen,” he said.
The concept of being chosen, and how to handle when you’re not, is something exhibition juror Amy Morel explored in her remarks to the crowd on Friday.
A sculptor living in Barnard, she encouraged students to “flip the script on rejection” as they pursue careers as artists.
She recalled when a friend announced that she’d set her “2026 art rejection goals:” the number of rejections she wanted to reach before the year was out.
“You’ve got to get through the noes to get to the yeses,” Morel said.
She also encouraged the young artists to see the AVA exhibit as a taste of what the future could be like, that one day they could have their own solo show.
Indeed, London Dupere, a senior college admissions counselor for Maine College of Art and Design, was among the visitors at Friday’s opening.
“I love coming to something like this,” she said. Normally, she has to evaluate students’ virtual submissions, and “I don’t always get to see the work with all the texture,” she said.
“I will be following up.”
Some students’ artwork at the show spilled over into other parts of their personal expression, and vice versa.
Hartford High School students Karlie Johnson, 16, and Tess Blake D’Amato, 15, chose to dress up like their pottery pieces: a pink lotus bowl and a sunflower, respectively.
“We put our brain cells together,” Tess said.
Karlie paired a green corset with a button-down shirt and ruffled skirt to evoke her piece’s petals and green lily pad, while Tess wore a yellow dress and a crown of giant plastic sunflowers.
“I’m very honored to have my piece up somewhere,” Tess said. “I never thought it would happen my Freshman year.”
Making art is her main hobby and form of stress relief. She likes digital work, but she’s recently started making more ceramics as well.
Meanwhile, Karlie loves all types of art. She doesn’t have a lot of space to store her work, so she opted to make something that was also functional.
“I love having something that looks like something else, that’s for something else,” she said.
On an adjacent wall, Ledyard Charter School student Charli Swan gave a snapshot into “Secrets of Maerich,” their web comic about Alix Wilde, a new student at Maerich Academy, a school for gifted kids.
Charli, 15, imagined if Alix met them in real life. They expect they’d be pretty angry with them for all the things they’ve done to them in the series.
In “Playing God”, Alix bears down on Charli, gritting their teeth, while their creator stares up at them with a mischievous smile.
It took Charli about 10 hours to make “Playing God,” which they did using Procreate, a digital drawing tool that they also use to make GIFs for their friends.
Like Karlie and Tess, their creativity came through in their clothing. At the opening, they dressed in all black with pops of color: a pastel chain, blue and pink puzzle piece earrings, a backpack with one of their favorite cartoon characters, Kuromi, a white rabbit dressed as a jester, on it.
“I live to make an impression,” Charli said.
AVA Gallery and Art Center’s 18th Annual High School Exhibition is on view through March 28. The show is free and open to the public. To learn more, go to avagallery.org.
More student work
This is the season for high school theater, with many Upper Valley schools producing a late-winter or spring show. These are usually great entertainment, on the cheap, and like the AVA show a window into the region’s creativity.
Here’s just one example: White River Valley High School’s production of “Into the Woods” is up on March 20 and 21 at the high school in South Royalton. Tickets are $10 for adults and $5 for students and seniors. To learn more, go to wrvsd.org.
Ballet at Chandler
Ukrainian dance company Grand Kyiv Ballet will perform “Giselle” at Chandler Center for the Arts at 7 p.m. on March 11. For tickets ($41.02-$71.91) and more information, go to chandler-arts.org.
Art in the Junction
First Friday is coming up this Friday in White River Junction. Among the day’s festivities is a celebration of 25 years of Two Rivers Printmaking Studio in the Tip Top Media Arts Building. To mark the occasion, 13 original members will exhibit their work in a show on view through April 25. An opening reception for the show is slated for 5 to 7 p.m. this Friday at the studio. Go to tworiversprintmaking.org to learn more.