Vein Vanity

            For the collage assignment, I decided to visualize the act of looking in a mirror. I find that this generation in particular is quite obsessed with vanity. This is likely in part due to social media, and the constant feeling of needing to upkeep a fabricated, elevated version of oneself. We are constantly asked to evaluate ourselves, promote what things are best and hide what things are worse. We are always looking at ourselves, both internally and externally, looking for our best angles, and assuring ourselves that we are okay. My purpose with this piece was to serve as a reminder of what we each are down to our core: blood and bones, atoms and cells, colors and shapes. I hope it comes as a relief to most to be reminded of how simplified we can be. What does a blemish or scar really matter when you remember that it is just a layer over your skin, over your blood, over your muscle, over your bone?  We each have these incredibly complex bodies that keep us alive, and anything that comes after that is secondary.

            I used a fleshy, unusual color for the representation of the woman in the piece. This was largely an aesthetic choice, as I thought it would compliment the pinks and creams in the companion piece nicely. It was also my goal to make this image different from the traditional figure drawing, and changing the paper to anything but white accomplishes that. I used a shiny silver piece of paper as the mirror, as it resembles one. The collage elements I used came from old textbooks and magazines, focused mostly on body parts, cells, and plants. These to me read as he most basic elements of who and what we are as individuals. The separation of the figure from the mirror gives it a dynamic composition as well as mirroring the reality of a person viewing themselves in a mirror.

            I looked to Wangechi Mutu’s work as inspiration for the texture and the makeup of the body. She is able to so seamlessly combine different patterns and elements to form a cohesive skin, blending the edges together so as not to be so apparent. She appears to do this with a combination of light, wet, watercolor painting and collage. She depicts mostly bodies and faces and this was good inspiration for the fleshy surfaces in my piece. Though I sense her pieces deal a lot with race and identity, I can read vanity into them as well.

            I found collage to be very difficult, as the individual pieces I assembled did not seem to blend so easily together as I had imagined. Though with the addition of more and more pieces the melding did get easier, I still feel some areas are rather jarring and artificial-looking. I did enjoy being able to work with drawing outside of a rectangular dimension, and find it to be one of the strongest elements of my piece. 

Refences:

Wangechi Mutu

Frances Stark

Stellarc

Nideka Akunyili Crosby

Bodies: The Exhibition