A bit about the work
Here's an option to play music from some ambiance
(Volume is rather loud)
"Me" was the first idea I had when I tried to conceptualize the theme of Identity. I wanted to write a poem about myself while exploring the meaning of the word identity. I looked up many different definitions and a few things kept popping up; traits/characteristics, ethnicity, speech/language, appearance, gender & sex, are some of the most frequently used words to describe identity. I wanted to write down who I was through those categories and see if I could actually find my own identity and as is mentioned in the poem, I eventually came to the conclusion that I am just me and that everything I am - even how others perceive me - is my identity.
Since I wanted to represent myself, I chose to do word art. I know that the cliche of "pictures are worth a thousand words" is overused but I wanted to add more worth to my picture (a literal picture of myself) by making my poem into art in the form of my picture. I have always admired this form of art and I wanted to try my hand at it; what better time than when I was writing a poem about myself and my identity? The picture in and of itself is a representation of how I present myself to the world and the poem that makes up the picture in the final copy is how I view my own identity transposed into that image.
The idea behind this work was actually inspired by a text that I wrote for another class. "A Villains Monologue" is an exert from a short story I wrote where a law enforcement officer is trying to catch a heinous villain.
This villain is charged with the highest offense of the time: spreading works of art. In a society that has deemed art to be harmful due to the many meanings, interpretations and emotions that can come from it, spreading it is obviously not what the higher ups want.
This monologue happens when the officer meets the villain as they are trying to get away. The idea behind this monologue was for the officer to realize the chink in their armor; the villains monologue was meant to force the officer to really look at themselves and society and question it. To try and pull off the mask that they were given and live for themselves.
The art was meant to reflect that idea so the character (a man in the case of the drawing) is pulling away from the masks and is left with a blank space that is meant to represent who they can be without them.
For this piece, I wanted to make a visual representation of the written work. I chose to do black-out poetry as a way to explore my own black heritage. I am of Trinidadian and Yugoslavian descent, but even if it is not obvious that I am mixed, I have never once had to defend or be the voice of explanation for my white heritage. In saying that, I wanted to explore some of the histories of black people and how it applies to today.
I chose to do it in black-out poetry as a symbol of how history is often not the whole story, and like how need to know information is blacked out on high-level documents, the details of history are also often blacked out.
Most people now know of slavery, especially of people of African origins and descent, and of the liberation of said slaves many generations later. But that is not to say that is no longer an issue in today's society; we are slaves to our images and online identities. Our histories online define us almost as much as our own personal histories do, if not even more. That concept was the inspiration for the visual work.
The artwork is supposed to represent the literal shackles that many ethnicities bore as they lived through slavery. At the same time, the small details on them - the highly recognizable icons - are representative of our modern shackles. The figure turning away is supposed to demonstrate the possibility of being free from the internet/society bound and historical shackles. The water - which is supposed to be a puddle - is the aftermath of the storm/turmoil that these histories have subjected and continue subject us to.
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