How Could You See Yourself?
This piece is a highly edited self-portrait. Its usage of vibrant colors, dot-technique, and photo manipulation around the face distort the realm of reality.
All portraits exhibit the personal style that I like to curate in my solo-driven design work. Saturated colors, beaming streams of lights, and nonsensical background environments fused to make an almost uncomfortable beauty. That uncomfortable beauty is influenced by my relationship with my sense of self, femininity, and the overwhelm of finding life’s path as an artist.
This project has not been sold for commercial or business purposes.
What I Did
Creative Direction
Timeline
Q3 2019
Collaborators
Photography, Jenny Scott
When I first started ideating what a self-portrait could look like, I wanted to emphasize the intersection of my interests in the fine arts and technology.
With my experience through higher education in the arts, I found this uneasy tension between traditional arts and technology integration that has been hard to navigate as someone who identifies as an “artist”, but whose main artistic tool is graphic design. You can see this idea in previous iterations, but the monotone blues and distant direction of the photo felt more melancholy than I wished.
While managing this career struggle, the piece intended to infuse the positivity that came to exist in the confusion of operating in a juxtaposition. Through this theme of juxtaposition, the other elements of my life that embody this theme came to the forefront.
The struggles I’ve had with femininity and gender identity as a nonbinary person who still enjoys femininity, how access to femininity interacts with my race as a Black person, and how aesthetics and interests are not associated with black bodies through my experience as an online user. From there, the piece evolved into the true juxtapositions of myself.
All portraits exhibit the personal style that I like to curate in my solo-driven design work. The saturated colors, beaming streams of lights, and nonsensical background environments fused to make an almost uncomfortable beauty. That discomfort is influenced by my relationship with my sense of self, ideas of femininity, and the overwhelm of being an “artist”.