Art decodes teen angst

I hate myself. It is an epithet scratched in the paint on the back of a mirror so it slashes across any face looking into it. It is a three-word message two teenaged artists use to symbolize youth culture. But when an image is reflected in a mirror it gets reversed. When “I hate myself” echoes through teenland it comes out sounding like “I hate you.”
This artwork is the kids’ way of turning the message around so it can be read properly.
“Art reaches people in a different way than just talking. It teaches people in different ways,” says Ellen Lamoureaux, one of the artists involved in the ‘I Hate You’ art piece which can be seen in the Peer Harassment Art Show coming up this Thursday at Art Space gallery.
It is a group exhibition at the behest of the Red Cross RespectEd program and done by art students at Duchess Park Secondary School. They were presented with workshops on peer harassment then asked to respond with artwork on the issue.
“I thought I knew everything about it but when Lisa (Evanoff of Red Cross) came and talked to us about it, I realized it wasn’t as straightforward as I thought,” Ellen says. It is a problem intrinsically deep in teen life, she adds. She and her art partner Shalina Edge point to their main piece, entitled ‘The Best Years of Our Lives’. Shalina says “the title is in an ironic tone. These are not the best years for a lot of us.”
Can it really be so bad? The answers surprised even the teen artists. One spoke of the exhibition to a friend she hadn’t seen for a while. The friend told her she had been away from school for precisely that reason: she was being teased so relentlessly that she quit the classroom to take correspondence courses away from the onslaught of abuse.
“It is a lot of things: racism, rejection, disrespect, name-calling, bias, sexual harassment, taunting… We hear a lot of young people say ‘I didn’t know that was peer harassment.’ This is giving them an understanding of how deep their own behaviour affects people. Affects themselves. We are trying to educate people that this is not normal behaviour,” says Lisa, who conducted the three-part workshops and is helping art teacher Shandi Whitehead organize the art show.
“Peer harassment is not just a problem. It is epidemic in our school system. School is supposed to help foster self-direction but it ends up fostering those who bully and those who have no choice but to hide from it,” Shandi says. There is a sadness and a frustration in her voice, and only a partial spark of hope that it can be turned around.
An art show is merely an expression to the general public of what she sees every day when kids interact with other kids. It is not much help to the kids who are noticeably different. Those are the ones who get the worst of the ribbing.
“It still bothers me. There are certain things you can’t ignore, but you do the best you can,” says Amanda Gaspard who started to really feel the jibes of her peers when she became pregnant.
She needed support then, and didn’t get it from people who could easily have been in her place. “At first I wasn’t sure how I felt – happy, scared, sad – but now I’m really glad I have Antonia (10 months old) in my life and I don’t care what people think.”
“There is a lot of abuse in schools for teen moms,” says Kristy Hardie, mother to 20-month-old Andrew and a friend of Amanda in the Pathways Program for young parents.
“A lot of teen moms are picked on in school, especially when you start showing. At first it starts to go around the school that you’re lying then, when it becomes obvious, the name-calling starts. And you get it from teachers, too, which is really awful. We’ve been told it’s not a good idea to take certain classes because of certain teachers, and they are right.”
The full spectrum of experience and emotion is found in the heart-felt art in the Peer Harassment Art Show. It can be seen at Art Space on January 10 at 6 p.m.
The public is encouraged to come out, see this unique self-examination of youth, support up-and-coming artist and take some of the sting out of being a teenager.