Project 8: Identity & Alter Ego Project

Piece #1

Piece #2

Piece #3

Unlike the expressive intonations of the Vietnamese language, I grew up in Hanoi with a culture of self-censorship. Accordingly, I tried not to express myself after hearing parents’ stories of workplace exploitation and social censorship.

However, studying in an American school, where being “Vietnamese'' became one of my identifiers, I felt more comfortable with expression, no longer so fearful.

Hence, for this week's prompt of Identity - Unusual Portrait, I utilized my digital photography skills to create self-portraits inspired by Rebecca Horn's body extensions, Tim Hawkinson's hands, and Erwin Wurm's photographic sculptures. By depicting the implosion of my body, I portray the explosion of emotions as I fail to hold them in.

I ran into a lot of trouble trying to figure out what to do with the hands and legs. Ultimately, by carefully choosing photography techniques so that I have the same lighting directions for all the body parts, I was able to begin putting them together. I also thought more about the environment I am put in. To continue such consideration from the first piece in the bathroom, I made another version of the same figure in the lake and considered for the first time how the idea may fit in a natural environment. Like how I worked with the shadow in the second piece, I created a reflection of the body in the water, and used brushes from Procreate to emulate the movement of the lake. I also considered how colors may affect the mood of the photo, and created a different mode for all three photographs.

Materials:

- Procreate on Ipad

- Iphone

- Myself as model

Alter Ego Final Project

Alter-Ego Statement: Gary Williams, broke college student from New York who is depressed due to lack of sleep. He is unaware that his “friends” are making fun of him, and could only cry inside as he regrets going to this bar so late.

For this project, the values that I ended up with (that are opposite to my personal values) were: sad, tired, lonely, white, and depressed. I immediately thought of the image of the lonely office worker at a night in the bar, reflecting on his life and tired of the work he has done the whole day. To portray such figure, I thought about highlighting the tiredness and overworked figure of the alter ego, and hence produced draft 1. After reading Ms.Watkins' comments, I tried a second approach for my piece: faking a bar environment through using the tools from Procreate and Illustrator. By dimming the lights, putting an image inside as the background, changing the hue and color grade to make the images cohesive and blend together, and changing the direction of the focus, I got what I wanted: Gary Williams, in a bar, alone, sad, gloomy, and wanting to escape the life he is living in.

Alter Ego First Draft