Back To School 

Editor: This oil painting is titled "Back To School" by Lucia Heffernan, and it features an anthropomorphic rabbit wearing glasses and a little backpack. It makes me chuckle – what strikes you about this work? Curator: Well, it certainly plays on some familiar cultural tropes. Animals in human clothes have a long history in art and illustration, often used to satirize or comment on human society. Why do you think Heffernan chose a rabbit, specifically, for this piece? Editor: Hmm, rabbits can symbolize a lot of things – innocence, fertility, timidity… maybe she's playing with those ideas in relation to going "back to school"? Is she perhaps inviting us to consider educational institutions as a modern day reflection on socio-political structures? Curator: Exactly! Think about the associations with "school." The image becomes about conformity versus individuality, the anxieties surrounding academic expectations. The backpack, glasses - they’re signifiers of education. What do these borrowed objects and the presentation suggest to you? Editor: I hadn't considered it quite that way. Maybe there is commentary here on our social pressures surrounding intelligence and the performance of it. It seems to ask: who are we doing it for? Who are these pressures for? Are they imposed from within our external environments? Are they self-imposed? Curator: Precisely. By using the animal as the subject, she deflects some of that critique back onto the viewer, challenging us to consider our own roles within those social structures and perhaps reconsider our biases. Editor: I never would have seen that just looking at a cute bunny rabbit! That wider historical lens really changes my understanding. Curator: Indeed. It demonstrates how an understanding of art history enables the image to become so much more than meets the eye!