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Visual Art, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin Visual Art, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin

Sickle

I used this piece in a video for my Instagram and I’m really proud of it. It’s the main antagonist of my comic, but it’s the most recent drawing and I thought I’d post it.

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Visual Art, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin Visual Art, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin

SF House

My friends and I ate at this restaurant, and even though the food was overhyped and not enjoyable, I was able to create this piece from the exterior of the restaurant.

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Photography, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin Photography, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin

Kory and His Husband Chris

I poured collodion onto a 5”x7” aluminum plate, then carefully tilted the plate to let the collodion flow to the edges. I watched closely for the collodion to set, before putting the plate into a tank of silver nitrate in a darkroom.Three minutes later, I removed the now-silver-coated plate from the tank and drained the excess silver nitrate. I posed my models with their eyes in one plane, so that I could focus properly. The lens must be open very wide to let in enough light to expose the tintype. The result is an extremely shallow depth of field, which requires the focus to be particularly precise. After putting my plate into the camera and exposing it, I took it back into the darkroom. I poured developer over the plate, and once I saw details emerge, I poured on water to stop the development. Finally, I put the plate into the fixer, varnished it (to prevent tarnishing), and scanned it. Tintypes were most popular in the late 1800s. While many artists try to exactly replicate the style of photographs at that time, down to the Victorian-era costumes, I am more interested in using wet-plate photography as a lens through which to view modern society and institutions. This portrait of a legally married gay couple juxtaposed with a medium that was popular when gay relationships in the U.S. were illegal reminds the viewer that gay couples existed long before they were documented in photographs.

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Creative Writing, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin Creative Writing, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin

Brood II

Inspired by the Canadian wildfires and a recent trip to my birthplace in Manhattan, New York, this work seeks to contain the feeling of silence in the mouth of calamity—when all noises destroy each other, at once, and a city on fire is almost nothing.

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Visual Art, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin Visual Art, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin

Metal Stairs Shelf

Everything is art, and art is everything to me. I find art in the mundane, in the shattered glass downtown and in my neighbor’s bright tulips. I create because it makes me feel a deep sense of pride, like I’ve done something meaningful, even if it’s simply drawing in my sketchbook. I’m inspired by my past creations and by highly creative people in my life: my mom, teachers, and my cousin Vee. I was inspired to create this shelf because I wanted a way to display my small art works, and what better way to do that than to build a piece of furniture that’s a piece of art in and of itself. Made entirely of metal, my stairs shelf is something I’m extremely proud of. It’s 17"x21"x5," and combines creativity (the miniature stairs) with functionality (the shelf). To design it, I used a 3D modeling software called Rhino. I CNC plasma cut my flattened layout on scrap sheet metal (to save resources) and used an electric saw and small shears to cut the steel rod railing. I then bent every piece in exactly the right place to ensure all levels of the staircase lined up when stacked. Finally, I MIG welded everything together (including 32 hand cut steps!) and polished the shelf with an air grinder. I find comfort in the fact that, through art, I’m leaving a little piece of myself out in the world, giving people a glimpse into who I am and the life I’ve created.

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Visual Art, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin Visual Art, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin

Harvest?

Seedlings grow with bumper harvests because of the farmer’s care and efforts. What causes the severe pollution on our beautiful Earth? Concern about the world environment is raised through this painting to show the massive garbage accumulated day by day because of people’s indiscriminate utilization of unfriendly materials in the environment. However, the situation went unnoticed because the garbage was disposed away, making the problem invisible. Just as the garbage presented in this painting looks like seedlings well organized in the farmland, it is hard to be aware that something is wrong. The dark smoke in the sky far behind is unheeded as well because it is dispelled by the wind swiftly, which makes the pollution issue like a stone sinking into the sea. Ignorant human beings don’t honestly face the fact that the massive garbage and the dark smoke cycle back to the environment in which they live would cause irretrievable health damage to themselves and let the Earth turn gray.

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Photography, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin Photography, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin

Black Chasm

This picture was taken of my uncle as we were finishing ice climbing in Catskill, New York. I knew that where we were going was going to be beautiful, and I wanted to get photographs so I brought my camera. I took photos though out the day, but after on his final down climb, right when it started to get dark, I saw the light from his headlight acting like a spot light on him, and decided to take a photo. This picture is important to me because doing outdoor adventures with my family is a tradition for us, and this was my first time going ice climbing. Taking this photo was meaningful to me because it allows me to share the feeling of ice climbing after dark in a forest, and being surrounded by the magnificent icefalls.

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Visual Art, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin Visual Art, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin

Soaring Spire

This piece is somewhat of an accumulation of what I've been drawing within the last couple of months, as floating castles resting on clouds has been a common occurrence in my math notebooks and such. In recent years, I have become enamored with clouds.

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Creative Writing, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin Creative Writing, 2024 Paulina Vo-Griffin

The World Insect Jar

I wanted the visceral and the mystical, magnificent beauty tinged with painful empathy, a potent longing expressed through both the limitations of human languages and experiences, yet with an opportunity to widen it. This story just started with a jar—one that contained the universe, yes, but still simply a jar. I did not know what it stood for. Yet, as I started to explore the world outside the jar, and its insides started to gray, I had to ask myself—what do I feel trapped by? What glass confines me? For this is a story of longing, and that craving does not exist without freedom first being ripped away. As a non-binary person stuck in an intrinsically heteronormative society, the answer came quite quickly. Thereafter, the jar became a cage where a mother assists her daughter’s escape from a never-ending cycle of forced femininity and motherhood, hoping for just the smallest taste of it for herself. None of this is truly explicit, and I do not mean it to be. But while the jar may represent many things—to limit a reader to a single interpretation would bring me utmost sadness—the story’s core revolves around entrapment and a yearning for freedom; the narrator knows she will never get it. But maybe her daughter will, and that might be enough.

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