The Singapore Art Museum will be hosting a special kind of art show in the month of January. Children and young people who are enduring chronic illnesses and other health challenges have mined their experiences to come up with artistic gold. The creative products of their labors will be on display at the museum for anyone interested in being inspired through their strengths.
The exhibit is held in conjunction with Project Dreamcatchers, which is a support group for a Singaporean hospital’s department of pediatrics. Established artists and art teachers worked with the young people for the duration of this project, offering guidance and inspiration where needed.
One young artist whose kidney is failing took a comedic inspiration from a social media fad in China that had young women holding pieces of paper in front of them to showcase how slender their waists were. In the Singaporean artist’s take on this, she holds a piece of paper in front of her own body, but the paper has fine ink line drawings that illustrate the inner workings of her body. While the artist might look normal from the outside, her body is failing her on the inside, and a complex structure of pipes and other mechanics might be fixed, or they might not.
Another young artist explores the idea of the constant need for validation among peers on social media. The work itself is holographic, but it seems to contain many additional dimensions, drawing the viewer deeper inside via a trick of the eye and lights surrounding the framed border of the work.
Another facet of the show is a young artist who painted a collection of sayings and motivational phrases on square canvases. Each saying is meant to inspire deeper thought even when we are engaged in mundane things, and was inspired by an ad campaign urging people to unplug from their devices in order to connect with their fellow human beings.
Art can have a multitude of benefits that might not be readily apparent. Other than teaching you a new skill you’ve never mastered before, art can help you work through issues that have been plaguing you, such as worries about your health, stress in the workplace, or disagreements that you have had with family members. Art is often used to help people cope with grief or other troubling experiences, since it might be easier to express feelings through the tactile practice of making art than speaking about them in a clinical setting. Think about signing up for an art class via SGArtClass.com to start enjoying all the benefits that art can bring you. Expert teachers are knowledgable in a variety of different art genres — from oil pastel drawing to watercolor painting, and many more. They can either suggest art projects for you to try or help you complete the projects that interest you the most.
To learn more about the young artists and their work, go to http://popspoken.com/arts/2017/01/project-dreamcatchers-finding-beacons-hope-art.