Your World is Your World

Mikolai Stasiulewicz

    I make work about what I learned from a self development course I took called the Landmark Forum. The course taught many basic philosophies based around how to life to the fullest. During the course I had an epiphany around how I dealt with my relationships. I found that I distorted my perception of my relationships through expectations and furthermore by a lack of information and misccomunication. I created my world with a negative perception of life and I saw the people I was closest to through a dusty rose colored glasses.

    My work is based around how I used to see my world. I use my art as a constant reminder to not slip back into that dissociative behavior. I paint friends and family in exaggerated ways. I create nonsensical characters in settings that relate to the individual I am painting about. Now instead of exaggerating my life, I exaggerate my art. I paint objects that the people in my portraits use often, to communicate what world I created around them. I link these objects or symbols to the relationship I have with these people. By exaggerating or distorting the relationship between the person and the object, the object eventually replaces them. These replacements were ineffective because they held me back from seeing my world and my relationships for what they really where. After this Landmark Forum I was able to realize these things that held me back from living with everyone I had in my life. What I know and who I am may be completely flexible and open to being invented or replaced in any number of ways through how I communicated in the past and how I communicate now.

MIKOLAI STASIULEWICZ is a senior Visual Arts major at Interlochen Arts Academy. He is from Grand Rapids, Michigan. He received a Silver Key for portfolio in the 2018 Scholastic Art & Writing Awards. Mikolai will attend Parsons School of Design in the fall.