It is an honor to be invited back to campus to jury this year’s Annual Juried Student Art Show at my alma mater. To me, this year’s show offers important impressions of our time, a tranche de vie or a slice of life from a young adult’s perspective. It has been a pleasure to bear witness to the exceptional abilities of emerging creative practitioners who live in extraordinary circumstances. We have felt the weight of a year in great grief and suffering but it has also shown us our strengths. Students at Hiram were encouraged to think of new ways of finding, processing, and creating. The work in this year’s show is a reflection of this commitment to innovation.
This year’s show presents experimentation with lines, layers, forms, colors, and concepts through a variety of mediums. The exhibition frames the deeply isolated experience of so many, globally; it is composed of displaced, fragmented objects, isolated figures in waiting, gazing outwards from private interiors but also found longing for something else in empty fields. While some artworks were chosen because of their developed sensitivity in material handling, others were selected for their critical stance in relation to the body in space, place and time. Special congratulations go out to the award winners, as these were truly wonderful and poetic accounts of our isolated yet shared lives.
-Zeerak Ahmed
Biography
Zeerak Ahmed is a multidisciplinary conceptual artist, curator and educator. Her artistic practice focuses on experimental music and sound art. Ahmed received her B.A in Studio Art from Hiram College in 2012 and her MFA in Creative Practice with the Transart Institute (Plymouth University) in 2017. Through sound sculptures, installations and performance works, Ahmed has been exploring the emotive and expressive qualities of the elusive medium of sound, particularly the voice. She is currently investigating the sonic and intellectual histories of female folk music from South Asia.
