Allison Belaks, a Senior at The Wheatley School and AP Art student has produced numerous works this year for her portfolio theme, “the impact of technology and its advancements on human connection and communication.” This article reviews and compares two of her pieces displayed around the school.
Instantaneous by Allison Belaks, Senior at The Wheatley School
Carrier pigeons were one of the fastest communication methods before the telegraph, radio, and television, dating back to the Roman empire and World War 1. Allison’s inspiration for “instantaneous,” came from both the awe and fear that “technology has made it where you can communicate with people instantly, where there’s no waiting period that there was, or is, with the traditional mail system,”
The background consists of recycled mail that she repurposed, with mail stamps scattered throughout using hot glue to piece them all together in a collage. She wanted to contrast the paper mail in the background with the paper text message that the pigeon is holding, showing that despite all advancements, a message is still a message. The “ancient parchment” that the pigeon is holding was made using kozo bark paper which she stained with coffee beans in order to get the “yellowy parchment color,” and then painted the text blurbs on with water colors. By contrast, the person, pigeon, and set of hands were created using acrylic paint. This piece was made using–and I quote “a little bit of this, a little bit of that,”–a highly experimental piece testing out new methods to bring out a wonderful collage of her very own “advancements” that she herself was surprised by over the course of one month.
“I think this was the first time that I used this many materials in one piece and experimented this much with the texture I could get, and I think that definitely set off a chain reaction to make more pieces like that. I don’t have to just put paint on a canvas.”
What inspired her personally for this piece was texting; “I always think about how I can go home and text or call my friends, and interact with them after school. That’s not something I would have been able to do 20 years ago or so. I think that’s kind of crazy, how fast technology has changed.” The instantaneous nature of texting and calling is certainly wonderful, but also sometimes very overwhelming with how fast information can move nowadays. I think that the art reflects this sentiment perfectly, showcasing different eras and styles regarding every advancement while keeping the main message clear and light.
Referencing a photo for herself due to the more personal nature of this artwork, the person given a “face” specifically represents her and how she communicates with her friends. The blurred words of the text and the receiving set of arms without a face represents how “open-ended” her communication can be. Additionally, with the advancement of technology to certain negative extents, you’re not sure exactly who you can be talking to on the internet these days which explores more serious and darker themes underlying the outstretched arms without a face. The innocent nature of the pigeon simply carrying the message represents how certain words can be misinterpreted and misconstrued, specifically commenting on how “with carrier pigeons, there is always this uncertainty with sending a message, but with a text you know it’s always going to go through, it’s not going to get intercepted or eaten by an eagle–whatever happened to carrier pigeons.” In comparing and contrasting traditional analog mail with modern messaging technology, while wonderful and advanced, human beings still struggle to communicate messages in their truest form. I also think that maybe that is part of human error, much like being a carrier pigeon in our own right. We carry the words from our hearts, hoping they make it from one heart to another without much trouble. In our own lives, we can see the scribble scrabble text as the “idea of a message.” It desires to make you think to yourself, ‘what have I always wanted to communicate clearly?’
Monotony by Allison Belaks, senior at The Wheatley School
“I was trying to communicate the monotony of staring at a screen. That’s pretty self-explanatory,” which is something I know that every one of us can relate to. Not only was this piece monotonous, but Allison specifically experimented with limiting her color palette for this piece to create an extra monotonous task for herself, contrasting to her usual usage of bright and vibrant colors seen in the previous piece. What really puts the nail in the coffin is the name of the paint used–Gouache paint–a name that pours down as slowly as molasses. This kind of paint is a mix between watercolor and acrylic, used to achieve the desired “slurred” effect of the scene while making sharp angles and color contrasts intending to make the scene cold and unforgiving. To make matters even more monotonous, this piece was completed over the summer. A depressing “dead-of-winter” painting, completed in the summer. The joke speaks for itself.
This painting focuses on the increasing usage of technology in educational settings:
“Even as we’ve grown up and gone from elementary, to middle, to highschool, so much has changed in the way technology has been used in schools and we’ve kind of been able to see that firsthand. Elementary schoolers are getting chromebookers first-thing, as soon as they come to school, whereas we didn’t even get them until middle school. The huge change from everything being on a SCREEN has definitely changed a lot.”
For some important context, for the graduating class of 2026, covid hit right in the middle of sixth grade, exactly when technology and education became inseparable for nearly a year and has since advanced beyond control. Covid was merely a gateway.
For Allison personally, this change meant that you become “always reachable.” She argued that teachers could post anything they wanted in the evening and still be expected to do it, whereas when we were younger you would go home and leave school behind until you come back the next day. “In one sense you’re connected with everyone, but also a little bit too connected.”
Allison wanted the computer lights to feel very harsh, cold, and isolating, which she achieved through its slight blue color and blinding whiteness, contrasting with the shadowed dull environment around them. For the people in the painting, “their entire world is grayscale,” and the only color they can process is the blue blinding light from their screens. With the longer shadows, everyone seems much more farther apart in the classroom then they may seem, driving the “isolation” effect even further. The blinding nature of the screens tries to reflect the feeling of being absorbed in these digital worlds, and the viewers focus on these screens rather than the bodies of the people themselves dehumanizes them. Furthermore, the absence of a teacher in front of the classroom and one huge screen only serves as a way to disconnect this classroom from humanity even more, being taught by a screen. People hide behind their screens, creating less emphasis on who the people actually are individually.
I think this is awesome. Well, NOT awesome for us, but an awesome display of emotional tug nonetheless.
The point of view of this painting makes the viewer into another one of these nameless students in a desk. Allison reflects that whenever she sits in front of her computer for too long, she struggles to escape the all-consuming thoughts of “is this all there is?” which can be related to our generation with more than words. Decreased mental health, increased anxiety, poor posture, loss of individuality and personal hobbies, you name it. When we become screens we lose features of ourselves, much like the greyscale people in the painting. This piece is even more impactful for me because this classroom mirrors one of the classrooms in our own school, somewhere in the 200s hallway. Allison remarked that one class that made her feel this way was pre-calculus. “Everyone in that class was a genius, I was fighting for my life.” We have all reduced ourselves to these sentiments in one phase of our life, or throughout our whole lives.
I think it’s very telling that both of Allison’s pieces of art are incredibly relatable in some way for many school students in this era. Technology has become this inseparable piece of our worlds, making us accessible to everyone and everything, and even then, we still struggle to communicate back with the world. It’s an age of overcommunication, and I fear we are all turning into carrier pigeons, true feelings lost in transit.
We need a year of hermits.