Continuations and Expansions

This semester I will be continuing with the themes and concepts I established in the fall, but this time the subject matter will be what I consider to be the third era of my life. This period covers everything from my high school graduation and move across the country to Rochester, to the events leading up to my coming out and personal acceptance as a homosexual, my first love, and the struggles I faced in molding myself to seemingly impossible standards as a professional artist in the animation industry. When I look back on this time, I feel as if it was a rebirth and a new found infancy where everything was possible and yet horribly frightening. There were no chains to bind me except the ones I clung to from my past and the complexity of my internal struggles expanded to encompass wondrously new territories. I can reduce this bubbling concoction of experiences down to one simple word:

 Emergence.

And so, with this new foundational concept, I have begun to examine the natural progression of form that would support my new themes. My works of last semester were primarily flat pieces that focused on images illustrating my struggles with the concealment and misdirected projections of my identity. This new theme calls for something more concrete and spatial, as it is one step closer to discarding the illusions that I had tried to maintain and, in truth, was the first time I openly invited others to peer beyond the screens of my fears.  The realization of these forms will be similar to my previous photograms with two exceptions:

1) I will be molding the fabric to my body so that it retains its shape, yet remains vague in terms of concrete detail.  The hand in the above picture is a test I did today with plaster bandages and is similar to what the fabric will look like.  You will see the form of my body as if there was a figure present underneath the fabric, still concealed but infinitely more concrete than the abstracted silhouettes of before. 

2)I will also be taking a more literal turn with the photograms by enlarging and projecting text from a journal that I had kept during college.  This act in itself is a huge leap for me in revealing things that I have yet been petrified to show. 

I hope to create a dialogue between the expression of my internal thoughts and physical manifestation of my body that reveals as much to me about this period of my life as it does to others.  It is an act of catharsis as well, for there is a lot yet left to express that has been pent up in the fortresses of my fears.  This semester will be a journey, hopefully a brutally honest one, that will allow me to openly discard my projections and reveal an intimacy that is closer to the truth of my identity and, hopefully, pave the road for a truer form of expression as a professional artist.