8 PM Saturday

This artwork depicts a scene that has become increasingly familiar to me over the last couple of years - doing volunteer work in a park.

I am visible in the center of the car sideview mirror, holding a pair of loppers and leaning in to wipe mud off my face. More volunteers can be seen working both in the mirror and the foreground, completing a variety of tasks including carrying trash bags, planting saplings, and shoveling mulch.

I aimed to capture the feelings of resilience, community, and service that doing environmental volunteer work brings me. The car sideview mirror is central to my artwork. It separates my canvas into two sections: the part inside the mirror, containing myself and multiple other volunteers, and the part outside the mirror, where parts of the car itself, the background forest, and another volunteer are visible. The section inside the mirror is tinted with reddish indirect light from the sunset, while the section outside the mirror glows warmly with direct light. Besides showcasing the strength of the Washington community in restoring our parks and forests by including volunteers hard at work in both sections, I also aimed to portray the scene as a moment of self-reflection by including parts of myself in both the mirrored and the un-mirrored section. Why do I enjoy environmental service so much? This question posed by the artwork is then answered by the artwork itself - for the good of the community, and for the natural world we all serve.