Night Masks

I saw, utterly,

this life.
I’d put it on.
I’d wear it like

--a crown, for
how it flashes.


-Carl Phillips, “Regalia Figure”


In creating a series of masked portraits, I am interested in the subverting the portrait genre’s privileging of the human face as a site of meaning and essential individuality. I covered the body with the clutter of a cultural landscape that is messy, consumptive, dispeopled. In this way, fragile notions of individual identity are eclipsed by the rituals of meaning-making that surround the production and consumption of everyday objects. I hope to reveal our relationship to the material world as a complex, fetishistic, emotional, and ritual phenomenon that is deeply embedded in our lived experience. This project is a serial rephrasing of the disjunction between the enduring myth of the individual and the enlivened material landscape.

Senior Show at Oberlin College, Spring 2011