2024 Senior Exhibition Artists

Connor Chan

Concentration: Art + Design: Drawing

About Connor Chan

Connor Chan is an undergraduate Drawing major working towards a Bachelor of Fine Arts at the University of Massachusetts Dartmouth. Growing up, Connor was interested in many different forms of art, but drawing was his comfort, what he knew best, and what he wanted to push further, so he chose it as his major. He always wanted to explore and perfect the human form, which remains a major focus in his work, while he thinks of concepts related to intimacy and human connection. His current body of work explores friendship through works that combine observation, memory, and imagination, and create meanings with the figures he loves dearly.

Statement

My current body of work, The Anatomy of Friendship, is an honest exploration of human connection with depth and complexity informed by my personal experience. It is about the "whole" friendship, depicted through representational images of friends and sometimes myself in moments spent together. Through my visual language and process—layering paint and colored pencils, varied mark-making and textures, irregular or amplified colors, and added elements such as a contorted dog and averted gazes—I show implications of complexity, hardships, joyous memories, and the work, both that went into creating the piece and that is inherent to the formation and sustenance of being and having a friend. When you truly allow someone into your life, you become very vulnerable, which is something that can be wonderful but also incredibly daunting and potentially harmful, a classic condition of life. All these emotions, the good and the bad, the joy and the guilt can coexist in individual moments and experiences. I seek to create work that shows an honest representation of this, the complexities that can exist in and around intimate moments, the signs of struggle and the resilience of the good. My hope is that people can find comfort in or relatability to my work; for it to be a clear act of appreciation and honesty. For my friends I hope they feel loved by it. It is for me and all the friends, past, present and future. Thank you to all of you.