Month: May 2018

My project was an attempt to capture a night out at a quintessential college bar.  It was an attempt to capture the essence of the bar and provide a narrative of a typical weekend night at the bar. Recently, I started going out to Milo’s place with my senior friends to spend time with them as they are graduating. As I spent more time in the bar I noticed that the place has its own essence and while each night is different than the night before but there are certain things and a certain feeling that gets replicated every time. I think my project tries to visually capture those moments that I think create the essence of the place.

I wanted to capture spontaneous moments and therefore I decided to use a disposable camera for this project. I was unable to see the photographs I was  taking which meant that I could not check if the i got a good photograph; the disposable camera allowed me to move from one moment to another rather than getting stuck on capturing one moment perfectly. Thus, the use of disposable camera was very liberating in that sense as the only thing I could do and had to do was take photographs and not worry about anything else.

   

In the wake of police brutality and senseless murder, I have begun to view my life as a liminal state. I feel as if I, being a person of color, is on the crossroads of freedom and restraint.

Recently, my mind has been plagued with a phrase: “I don’t want to be erased”. It has become an ode to that liminal state, where I am on the cusp of feeling expendable and feeling alive. My project focuses around the anxiety I feel because of my deep connection to my Black history and the emotions that arise from police brutality, as well as the reminder that I a a human being who loves and is loved.

Each photo connects to another, creating a dialogue behind the present and the past. I am a black woman with strong family ties and friends; however, being a black woman means I continue with this historical journey that begins with slavery, Jim Crow, and civil rights.

This dialogue never leaves me. It has become a part of my every day journey, where a chain, a dart board, cotton, and even a “white paper only” sign alludes to this history. These items are mundane in their spaces, but they are the threshold of my reality. They become heavy in their context and, from my own life perspective, read as symbols. They become my own elaborating conceptual symbols–constructed metaphors–and change the way in which I live in this world. At the end of all of this history, I am reminded that based on the pigmentation of my skin–I could be taken away from my family and this journey. Which is why I cry to everyone in this piece: I don’t want to be erased.

For my final project, I thought it would have been interesting to capture different emotions with three subjects. In order to have achieved this, I showed five completely different videos and captured the reactions during the process. Each person is different and will react differently. Some videos are more triggering to one than others. These reactions are all organic and not forced. It was interesting to compare the emotion’s of each subject. As you can see, each person has a completely different facial expression. Each photo is unique in that sense. Some reactions may be similar, but they are very different at the same time.

 

I chose to take photographs of my family. I have been throughout the semester and I really wanted to make it a bigger piece. I love showing what I fund personal and beautiful in my life, but everyday, into something beautiful for others to witness. A window into a life that others don’t have access to. It is very intimate which I love.

For my project, I decided to focus on covering up our insecurities.  For my last project, I photographed the body and the parts of each subject’s body that they feel most insecure about.  For this project I decided to focus on the face and the process of taking those insecurities and covering them up.  I used two subjects and photographed them without any makeup on, them getting ready for a night out, and a photo of them together in light make up.  Additionally, I created two collages to portray each part of the face.  The collages are all individual pictures that were taken close up to the subject.  By enlarging parts of the face that may not get much focus, I hope to give a new sense of beauty to each individual part of the face.  I left one or two parts of each collage in color to portray the make up on that part of their face and how each subject feels a need to cover up.

I really enjoyed this project and if I had developed this idea sooner, I would have loved to make more collages of faces, maybe even more abstract.  I hope that these photos speak to each other one in the hopes of the stigma of beauty, make up, and insecurities.  

  

I wanted to use my Posse as a vehicle to express ideas of individuality, bonds outside of blood, and being comfortable in your own skin. Posse is a scholarship foundation that allows kids in the DMV the ability to further their education at a PWI, the foundation sends 10 kids to attend these schools however they do not expect for the Posses to become close, however Posse 12 is a super close Posse and although we’ve known each other for a year it feels as though w’ve known each other our whole lives.

First, a definition: designer baby: “a baby whose genetic makeup has been selected in order to eradicate a particular defect, or to ensure that a particular gene is present.”

This project is fairly hypothetical; it is futuristic and speculative; at least to me, it feels plastic, and quite uncomfortable. The concept of genetically altering an embryo for cosmetic purposes unsettles me, and while I myself can identify a few things I would not mind to have changed about myself, I find it disturbing, and a little sad, that we’ve reached a point in our struggle towards perfectionism that we may even choose to give our children the perfect eyes, perfect hair, perfect, well, anything genetic before we even get the chance to know and love what isn’t perfect about them.

Partially for my growth as an artist and a person and partially because of the relatively easy access, I used some of the people I am close to as subjects of my images. I took these people I’ve grown to know and love and changed them; I made them ‘designer.’ Each image is only one half of each individual’s face, but mirrored, making him or her completely symmetrical. Their physical characteristics are listed below, as well as one ‘alteration failure,’ that is one thing they wish they could change about themselves.