Stephanie Oh
Stephanie is from California but grew up mostly in Greensboro, NC. She is 16 and a rising senior at Northwest Guilford High School. She has an older brother but (sadly) no pets. Stephanie has always shown interest in creating things, both artistic and practical. She enjoys the little things in life, documenting her life in journals and taking photos of the world around her. In her art, Stephanie takes inspiration from warm colors, aesthetics, living beings, and creates with the intent of promoting a strong message or idea. She started off with graphite and colored pencils, but has been branching into painting and mixed media. Environmentalism is an important motivating factor in her art, as well as mental health and humanity.
Past Work
Residency Work
A Piece of Us is a manifest of my childhood dream of starting an open art studio. I had always dreamt of creating a space for people to come create freely, as that is an environment I have always searched for. Inspired by our teacher Grace’s lessons on residencies and social practice, I created my own small workshop, and produced a collage through social practice.
I intended for this piece, as well as the workshop experience as a whole, to be a reflection of GSW and its community. As we are all high school students, it is easy to not have time for creative outlets. For this reason I wanted to create a welcoming, free environment for the students. I especially wanted to give students in other disciplines a chance to create.
The goal of the collage was to include bits of everyone’s creative products from the workshop, from paintings to even abandoned scraps. To collect these things for the collage, I asked each visiting person to leave behind one thing they created. By using peoples’ creations as the only medium for the collage, it truly shows bits and pieces of our community. It gives insight into each of the creative minds of the GSW students, and the unique beings that they are. I gathered these creations and mounted them, also incorporating things from the event itself like the tablecloth that I had decorated.
This experience forced me to step away from my usual traditional art pattern, and to do something eccentric. It taught me a lot about things other than art as well, such as being in charge of my own event and planning everything. Seeing so many people talk together and just create made me so happy, as I had not expected so many people from other disciplines to be interested in art. Throughout the residency period I worried a lot about the final collage, and the limited time I would have to put it together. However, during the workshop itself and afterwards, I realized that the point of my residency should not be the physical work created, but rather the experience of the workshop and the “social practice” I was doing. Assembling a more “abstract” work of art also helped me realize that abstract art takes more thinking and planning than I thought.