Ryan Isabelle

My experience in the art program has not been anything enlightening or profound. I would not call my specific education a success story. I would even go as far to say that not only do I hate art, but I also do not consider myself an artist. This led to a struggle of trying to think of anything that I would want to put as part of my senior show. When Covid led to the shutdown of Alfred and the art studio, I felt nothing. I was able to devote my time to other things which I would include as part of my show, but I did not feel any particular emotion in regards to not being able to use the studio, I don’t think I had ever considered whether I wanted to do anything with my art degree regardless of what opportunities might be there. Through this art free time period of exploration, I was able to craft things that made me happy and explore activities I always had a curiosity in. This includes tarot, character designs, and astronomy.

Everything within my exhibition is something I feel passionate about, and will continue to pursue. I decided to organize everything based on the genre that each interest fell under. The cards that I designed include an oracle deck based on astronomy with images from NASA, along with a normal tarot deck which simplified the meanings of the tarot cards into their most basic elements. I decided to place the astronomy themed deck with the tarot deck based on the physical manifestation which the cards took. For the interest in astronomy, I decided to put in various lab reports, photographs and constellations. The lab reports came from the Astronomy Lab I was in, the photographs came from a combination of my telescope and my phone’s camera, the comet photos coming from an artist grade camera. The comic comes from a whimsical desire to illustrate some weird narrative, I hadn’t put much thought into the development, and just wanted to illustrate as much as I wanted to, for as long as I had assemblance of drive.