Masked Identity

 

 

For the project I was unsatisfied with the wire and paper method of constructing a mask. I had a vision for a mask that would be best constructed from wood and paper. I fabricated five frames out of several lengths of wood I purchased. Within these frames, I mounted a series of varying sized paintings I made using the colored inks from the kit. I then attached these frames together in a way that I found to be satisfying to my vision and slightly jarring to a viewer of the piece.

The mask to me represents the different frames of contained chaos that exist beneath the surface for me at most times. The mask is a manifestation in a visible form of this chaos. I decided upon the colors used in the mask with some consideration as to what their associations would portray.

For the photography element of displaying the mask piece, I decided that an outdoor environment would best suit the feeling I was trying to associate with the piece. Being in the real world as opposed to the studio, the uncomfortable, alien feeling of having a large sculpture in front of a face is to me greatly amplified. I chose to shoot my piece at the beach in the hour or so around sunset to achieve lighting quality in my images that was more intense and dramatic. I feel that my photos have an ominous and dramatic quality that I am very satisfied with.

Inspiration

“Behind Blue Eyes” – The Who

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=BfuWXRZe9yA 

Untitled – Jackson Pollock

Hamlet, Act IV, Scene IV – William Shakespeare

How all occasions do inform against me, 
And spur my dull revenge! What is a man, 
If his chief good and market of his time 
Be but to sleep and feed? a beast, no more. 
Sure, he that made us with such large discourse, 
Looking before and after, gave us not 
That capability and god-like reason 
To fust in us unused. Now, whether it be 
Bestial oblivion, or some craven scruple 
Of thinking too precisely on the event, 
A thought which, quarter’d, hath but one part wisdom 
And ever three parts coward, I do not know 
Why yet I live to say ‘This thing’s to do;' 
Sith I have cause and will and strength and means 
To do’t. Examples gross as earth exhort me: 
Witness this army of such mass and charge 
Led by a delicate and tender prince, 
Whose spirit with divine ambition puff’d 
Makes mouths at the invisible event, 
Exposing what is mortal and unsure 
To all that fortune, death and danger dare, 
Even for an egg-shell. Rightly to be great 
Is not to stir without great argument, 
But greatly to find quarrel in a straw 
When honour’s at the stake. How stand I then, 
That have a father kill’d, a mother stain’d, 
Excitements of my reason and my blood, 
And let all sleep? while, to my shame, I see 
The imminent death of twenty thousand men, 
That, for a fantasy and trick of fame, 
Go to their graves like beds, fight for a plot 
Whereon the numbers cannot try the cause, 
Which is not tomb enough and continent 
To hide the slain? O, from this time forth, 
My thoughts be bloody, or be nothing worth!

In Process