This year, I have struggled greatly with my theme, but I have finally come to a conclusion. My theme started as a study on depersonalization, and I completed five pieces with that theme. I centralized on my own personal experiences, and also my own feelings of being an alien in a society of humans. I ended up changing my theme to something that can cooperate both new and old themes. My new theme is about ugliness, and how the ideas around it are very harmful. My ideas were based off of the fact that diversity does not equal unattractiveness. I showed this by creating characters so inhuman and completely deformed to “poke fun” at the people who think normal physical traits are ugly. I am very happy with my current theme.
This piece is about filth. overall filth and dirtiness is seen as ugly. I am showing that imperfections are not ugly, and the things that are considered ugly are just natural parts of human existence. The picture shows a woman with exaggerated features, grey skin, greasy hair, and extreme boils and acne. This is not to show that these trains are ugly, but to expose them for beauty. Art is imperfect and ugly, which is why it’s art.
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This piece is about the decline of physical and mental health due to depression/self esteem issues. Pictured is a person, extremely skinny and looking very depressed. They are “spiraling” in thoughts, and this is due to self image. The way the world views imperfect traits is damaging to physical and mental health, as shown in this piece.
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This piece is about ugliness in a different way. I am showing the fact that diversity does not = ugly by creating characters that are so far beyond realistic. This character has major physical afflictions and is not human. In doing this, I am showing the unrealistic standards of being human in general.
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This piece is based off of the idea that acne is stereotypically ugly. I drew a person with a giant infected hole in their face to take the whole idea of “acne = ugly” out of proportion. I’m poking fun at the people who believe natural things are unattractive.
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This piece shows a three headed woman who’s smiling very big. This is to poke fun at the idea that you have to smile to be beautiful, or to show happiness. T saw a video of a woman walking down the streets of nyc and a man catcalled her saying “smile for me.” This piece is vaguely based off of this, and the idea that smiling is something to be done for other people.
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This piece represents the disfigurement of my own personal reality. The creature seen on the page is how I see myself. I see myself as a non human being with extremely exaggerated features. I feel separate from reality, and separate from other people. It can interfere with my relationships with other people by forcing me to space myself from others.
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For this sustained investigation I chose to submit a photograph of myself that I originally took for my artists research page for Cindy Sherman. I made my features look very exaggerated. This is to represent depersonalization and how I view myself. I see myself as an unnatural alien creature, separate from the human race.
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This piece is about a worldview of depersonalization. I asked a friend what depersonalization is life for her and she said “you have no control over you body, and you will feel like you aren’t part of your body. It is very scary to experience, and makes you want to cry because you want to know who you are as a person but you can’t.” I tried to show this in my piece by having a cartoon 2D representation of me staring back at myself. This is how it feels to depersonalize and it’s almost an unreal feeling. I wanted to show how scary can be and how it needs to be talked about more.
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This investigation I took a different turn on my whole theme. This week I wanted to focus on the idea of the third eye, which is “The most common Sanskrit name for the Third eye chakra is “Ajna”, which means “command” and “perceiving”.
This chakra is related to the “supreme element”, which is the combination of all the elements in their pure form” (chakras.info). I wanted to show this because it is almost a third person pov, in which everything is all knowing and seeing. It feels like an out of body experience, and can relate to my theme of almost being seperate from your body. I wanted this piece to look very cartoon-like and I am proud of how it turned out. |