Persona

When I think of persona, one of the first things that comes to mind is a persona that nearly everyone adopts and presents in their daily lives: gender. Gender is extremely performative. When we think of gender, many of us have archetypes, stereotypes of things that are supposedly feminine or masculine- we have been taught to categorize so much into each side of this binary. Names, speech, careers, behaviors, films, music, body, physical presentation- we have ideas for all of these things in regards to what is male and what is female. One of the most obvious ways in which gender is performed is through the way we present ourselves physically, our clothes, our costume. A person's clothes, so the nameless "they" might tell us, cannot only tell us if they are female or male, but what type of man or woman they are. This plays a huge role in stereotyping. As a woman, I am constantly inundated with images defining femininity-images that don't necessarily reflect me or allow for all aspects of my personality to coexist. These have become more fluid in the past few decades, but there are still gender norms and clear violations of these norms. It is as if we fragment ourselves and, each day as we dress, select which part of ourselves we want to present to the world. I wanted to explore these stereotypes of women, particularly in times when they were less fluid, and how they were manifested in fashion and the prescribed wardrobes of the times. I placed myself in my photos, dressed up in the persona of stereotypical women of the Victorian era, the 1920s, and the 1950s. I tried to perform actions that might be typical of these women in atypical contexts where the stereotype would seem out of place. I wanted to look as if I was wearing a costume, one that neither represented me nor had a real place of belonging in our world.

Final Project- Shadow Puppets

I have been thinking a lot about transformation and the effect of external forces acting upon a stationary entity. Such forces can act as either means of destruction or of healing, and their nature can at first be ambiguous. You can either wait for something external to act upon you, transform you, and accept this change for better or for worse, or you can take that force of change upon yourself as your own, draw strength from it, taking control of your own existence and making of it what you will. These forces that act upon your life and the strength and change you can take from them may come at any time, past, present, or future. You might not anticipate them, and you might not understand or even experience their full effect until years later. They are like traces lurking around existence, out of space and time, like shadows.

one: A woman, drowning; A force of change, be it destruction or healing
two: the force, having transformed the woman, leaves its mark on the landscape, leaving the woman a mountain, imobile
three: The woman takes the transformation on herself and instead of letting it destroy her, takes strength from it. She pushes the rock away from her form, enacting her own change on the landscape and forming solid land. She begins to rise.

The woman, now with limbs and strenth she had previously been lacking, moves forward on solid ground, forward from the point of her transformation.

Look! Picasso did light drawing...

Shadows

Paintings

Performance Photographers

Li Wei

Levi van Veluw

Cindy Sherman