Solano Mall Art Show Winners

For many, Art is the singular thing that makes the world go round. Without it, we’d descend into complete and utter chaos. While we are currently restricted to the arts that come into our homes- television, movies, games, and social media – we can find outlets to appreciate fine art in various ways. Before the Shelter at Home order, several Armijo students were featured in an art show at the Solano Mall’s art gallery and were among the winners for the contest.
1# Shrouded – Liana Wong (1st place for Sculpture / Assemblage)
The first one takes the cake for being unique among the art pieces. Instead of a traditional drawing, Shrouded is a hoodie held up in a pose by the help of papier-mâché. The hoodie is filled with overlapping Instagram pictures. Instead of a normal human head, it is replaced with a cracked phone. It is, of course, about how most of us structure our entire life through the eyes of  our phone screen, with nothing on the inside. Basically it means your life shouldn’t revolve around what some random internet stranger thinks of you.
2# – The Nature of Technology (Liana Wong – 1st place for Oil Painting)
The Nature of Technology depicts two birds in dapper-wear sitting on a typewriter in the sky with one of them saying “Lemme tweet dat!” My apologies to the original artist but this artwork seems like a meme that your mom would post on Facebook after getting into an argument with her teenage daughter. It doesn’t say necessarily anything. Maybe the absurdity of tweeting in itself, but that’s scraping the barrel for anything. All in all, while the art itself is pretty good, the message it’s trying to convey is completely null and void.
3# Bon Appetit (Liana Wong – Honorable Mention for Drawing)
The last piece of art is a simple chalk drawing depicting a phone on a plate, the aforementioned phone having a picture of food on it. Bon Appetit is another Facebook tier meme piece of art. Again, that doesn’t mean it’s bad. In fact the message on this art is much more comprehensible; sometimes we prioritize social media more than basic everyday needs. It’s just something that has been done over and over again dozens of times. But maybe that’s the problem, maybe we always say that social media is a problem, but we keep on using it no matter what. Or maybe I’m just overthinking a simple contest for amateurs.
Other winners from Armijo were

Acrylic Painting
1st  Place -Tommy—Gissell Guzman (included in slide show)

Color Photography
2nd  Place – Getting Feet Wet—Kayla Aguarin

Watercolor Painting
2nd  Place – Train Station on Water—Tawnya Zimmer
3rd  Place – Giant Flower—Tawnya Zimmer

Honorable Mention Certificates
Acrylic (included in slide show)
Candor Effect—T’Kai A. Smith
Printmaking
Spurned into Strands—Maria Verduzco
Drawing
Dragonfly—Anahi Hernandez-Guerrero
Steampunk Insect—Olivia Thompson