FOURTH YEAR
My Ties to Us and You
My Ties To Us and You is a series of mixed media portraits that explore the complex relationship between a person’s private, internal self-image and their public persona. The thoughts of the subject, viewer, and artist are portrayed through embroidered thread and sewn directly on to portraits of family and friends photographed in natural light. The prints of these portraits are then digitally torn into fragments and are placed and sewn back together. They are collaged to reflect the often dissonant and fraught relationship between the sense of a person’s physical and emotional selves, and the photographic images that circulate via platforms such as social media and family albums.
The threads become figurative extensions of the subject’s mind and thoughts, as well as my own subjective understanding of each individual. Since all the models are close friends or family, there is a space for the models to be emotionally vulnerable and open to sharing a more fragile sense of self. This series continues to study the relationship that color and emotions/personalities have with each other, as I have in my previous work. This new work references photography that is moving towards creating portraits that incorporate more than the subject’s physical body, and more conceptual ideas imbedded in the subject’s persona. The work is the exploration between mind, body, and photographic representation that question my ideas of personal autonomy, uniqueness, and an individual’s place in the world.
The threads become figurative extensions of the subject’s mind and thoughts, as well as my own subjective understanding of each individual. Since all the models are close friends or family, there is a space for the models to be emotionally vulnerable and open to sharing a more fragile sense of self. This series continues to study the relationship that color and emotions/personalities have with each other, as I have in my previous work. This new work references photography that is moving towards creating portraits that incorporate more than the subject’s physical body, and more conceptual ideas imbedded in the subject’s persona. The work is the exploration between mind, body, and photographic representation that question my ideas of personal autonomy, uniqueness, and an individual’s place in the world.