Photo Blog

final project for VA351

(actual size: 40"x40")

Bowdoin Bowdoin: Artist Statement

When I went about creating this group portrait, I asked friends, “what would your super concentrated self be?” “How would you ideally appear if you were pinned as some type of character?” And so, my subjects began to have some individual influence over how my final composition developed. Some characters feel familiar and some more fantastic, but it was up to each person to decide on aspects or characteristics they thought were important about them, allowing these to take over their whole character.

I knew I wanted to suffuse this piece with some sense of the hyper-real - a feeling that all things are possible and plausible in this image, but somehow something is not right. It is too real to be true. People appear as recognizably themselves, but magnified and not quotidian. With digital collage I worked towards this feeling, assembling an array of characters in an imagined landscape; everyone has their own defined persona, brought together to interact in one space on multiple planes.

Both the entire composition and each person’s portrait are highly constructed, conscientiously crafted to capture both the individual, as well as their interactions with each other, their surroundings or the camera. I manipulated the bodies of subjects at the time of their portrait and later the placement of bodies in relation to each other on the field to create an image that asks viewers to draw connections between subjects and wonder about their relationships and true identities. This portrait overall is intended as a humorous and odd picture of people I have meet during my time at Bowdoin; a playful way of looking at identity and image. My hope is that the viewer, even if unacquainted with the subjects, can still take this massive amount of information and detail and enjoy navigating through this image to create a narrative of their own.