Second semester senior year is markedly a transitional period: With childhood in the rearview mirror, and life beyond high school just one step away, the final months are filled with reflection and nostalgia. Three seniors with this topic fresh on their minds chose to reflect on their younger selves and lives through their artwork.
Annie Altemus, Maddie Beaubaire and Sophia Calne are all students in Advanced Study art courses. Altemus and Calne take photography, while Beaubaire participates in studio art. These in-depth and highly independent courses culminate in creating a gallery exhibit in the Eastern Star Gallery.
Their exhibit, “Waning Wonder” opened Wednesday, March 12 during lunch. The show meditated on childhood whimsy and the power of these formative years of life. The three seniors have spent the past few months collaborating together to create their exhibit, and they celebrated its opening with their families and the rest of the community.
“From the very beginning, we knew we wanted to center around the idea of childhood and nostalgia,” Altemus said. “But once we started working more on the show and coming up with different ideas and seeing what art we wanted to put in the show, we were able to narrow it down a lot more and land on our theme of Waning Wonder.”
In their gallery description, the three seniors wrote, “Our title: ‘Waning Wonder,’ alludes to our childlike wonder that feels fleeting and slowly fading away. When the moon is waning, the entire moon itself still exists, but it cannot be seen in its totality. Likewise, our childlike wonder hasn’t disappeared, though sometimes it’s less visible.”
“We thought for a while about the name, and we were going back between Growing Pains and Waning Wonder for a while, and I wasn’t really on board with [Waning Wonder] until we started to embellish the moon part a bit,” Beaubaire said. “So that’s when Annie made the paper mache moon bowl and crochet stars, and, in general, we just added a lot of celestial elements, which really enhanced the show.”
Although they didn’t immediately have a name for their gallery, the seniors knew they wanted it to center around their childhoods. Calne said the exhibit simultaneously pays homage to their childhoods and helps them move on from it and into the next chapter of their lives post-high school.
“Just as seniors and as we are growing up and moving forward into a world past high school, we’ve started to reminisce on our childhood more and on that sense of wonder and innocence that we had and that we may feel like we don’t have as much anymore,” Altemus said. “So, for our show, we really wanted to channel that and make it so other people, whether seniors, whether people who are sad about leaving or excited, could walk in and feel joyful or cheerful, or they could feel sad and think about their own childhood and reflect on their own memories.”
Altemus chose to photograph kids around Los Angeles in spaces that are quintessential to childhood. She also wanted to choose places that she too had grown up going to.
“I went to the Santa Monica Pier and to Holmby Park, and I just took my camera around and started taking photos of kids everywhere,” Altemus said. “I ended up capturing some really nice moments between kids and their parents or kids with their friends just jumping with joy while looking at the rides and the scenery. And I think that shows that kids — no matter where they are from — all have the same sense of wonder that we really wanted to showcase.”
The gallery included an interactive activity in the middle of the space. The seniors built a floor length canopy that hung in the center of the room. Inside the canopy were hand-crocheted stars, mini stuffed animal cutouts and a handmade moon sculpture that rested upon a pedestal.
“Inside the canopy, next to the moon, all of the viewers were given three prompts to journal about on paper stars. The first one was, ‘What’s a word that comes to mind when you think of your childhood?’ The second one was, ‘Write down a childhood story or memory,’ and the third one is, ‘What’s something you wish you could tell your younger self?'” Calne said. “It honestly just became this beautiful thing where everyone was filling out the stars, and then we taped their sentences or their words onto the back wall of the gallery.”
Beaubaire, like the two other seniors, said the canopy was her favorite aspect of the show. She appreciated the level of reflection it brought to the space and was proud of the creativity and design that went into its creation.
“I love the canopy. I think it turned out really well,” Beaubaire said. “I feel like usually when you have a vision with these things, if you execute it, it doesn’t become what you envisioned it to be, but I think that, if anything, the canopy turned out better then we ever imagined.”
In addition to the photographs and artwork that adorned the gallery walls, there was a short movie projected for viewers to watch. Altemus compiled home videos from her collaborators and strung them together with hand-drawn animations and background music.
“Earlier in the year, I originally just made a movie of my own home videos, just to have for myself. But when we started thinking about the show, I thought it would be really nice to include the other people who are doing the show in the video as well,” Altemus said. “And when Sophia and Maddie started sending me their videos, I noticed that there were clips that, even though we didn’t know each other, and we had completely separate childhoods, we had these experiences that were so universal and just fit together so perfectly.”
Calne focused on photographing stuffed animals to display in the exhibit. She collected everything from stuffed bears, to stuffed yetis from different friends and family members. The cutouts were placed along the perimeter of the space, and were a “fan favorite.”
“I just love the stuffed animal cutouts. I chose to scale them up really large, to sort of play with the proportions and experiment,” Calne said. “But we also did it so it feels like you are a child when you’re looking at them, because proportionally, the stuffed animals are the same size they would have been if you were the size of your three-year-old self.”
Beaubaire said that her favorite aspect of putting the gallery together was collaborating with Altemus and Calne. The three of them had not previously worked together on a project this big, and she said she appreciated their creativity and passion. Calne and Altemus both noted how proud they were of the exhibit and said that although there were surely certain tribulations, they are immensely pleased with the final show.
“I’m really proud of all the hard work each of us put into the show and how much planning went into this,” Calne said. “The process was really cool because we kept creating new ideas, and it kept transforming into something totally different, and I am really proud of the work we’ve done the way it looks.”
