Jessie-Marie Rifkin
St Ursula's College
METANOIA ACADEMY
Graphic Design
Ballpoint pen, watercolour, drawing tablet
Ideas of storytelling and escapism are vital to my art, as all of my works contain references to my personal memories and dreams. I wish others could escape to these places as well. My intention in this body of work is to convey a story of reorientation, of adjusting from the real world to fantastical places. It incorporates physical and digital mediums, using traditional backgrounds with cartoon-like characters placed over the top to ‘animate’ scenes. The characters represented are those I have had since the beginning of high school. Metanoia Academy is my way of communicating this aspect of myself.
My artmaking practice has been influenced by the study and interpretation of the following artists: Joanna Quinn, Rodrigo Sousa, Richard Williams
Marker's Commentary
Metanoia Academy is a coherent and technically resolved graphic design body of work that provides an oscillating concept about transformation between the real and unreal, within the mind of the artist. The audience is left to consider: have the figures been emancipated from the stage they are in, or are they escaping it? These questions arise as the sharply composed images, at times, reveal other worlds through a torn page or under-staircase motif. Two main materials and styles are used to convey this fluid relationship between the two states of being: a hand-rendered ink sketch aesthetic is primarily used in the background, and a bolder illustrative technique is applied to the figures.
These two representations help to build a dialogue within the images, as we the audience recognise the black and white background as conceptually less stable than the changing figures, themselves in black, white and red. The faces within the nine images are drawn with a broad range of expressions, adding possibility to the story with the eight vignettes and one character work. While all the artworks stand alone you can also imagine them as storyboards for a moving animation or part of a longer narrative and publication in the form of a book. Each composition is carefully arranged to create successful hierarchy within the images, building dynamism and relationships of the central figure to their surreal situation.