self-evaluation

In my project I wanted to emphasize fragility of human existence. I decided to choose still life and focus on Vanitas theme which is often depicted in still life painters from Flanders and the Netherlands. The message of my work should remind the viewer that joy of life is only a transient moment. The main themes that appear in my project are beauty and passing of time.

Object in my photographs are carefully chosen and carry symbols. Glass goblets and exotic fruits such as citrus fruits were a luxury. In Calvinist Holland in the Baroque period the luxury was seen as a reward for honesty and piety. The sign of being chosen by the will of God. Honesty and godliness is also a commitment to conduct exemplary and virtuous life. On the other hand, the temptation of earthly goods are attracting crime. Luxury is a sign of decadence and desire for transgression. Vice is punished with the loss of earthly goods. Unthinking attachment to luxury and immense desire of power, and so eventually leads to their loss, because all the goods are transient.

Mirror, which I decided to put next to my photographs, is a symbol of feminine beauty and attractiveness, but also their transience, vanity. It also symbolizes crossing to heaven after death.

I was also considering to put more objects that would symbolize death and passing life (such as a burning candle or a withered flower) but at the end I decided that it would too much.

my final images

Beautiful destruction

Time After Time & Blow Up [2007]

The large-scale photographs entitled Blow Up depict elaborate floral arrangements, based upon a 19th Century still-life painting by Henri Fantin-Latour, captured in the moment of exploding. Gersht´s compositions are literally frozen in motion, a process dependent on the ability of the advanced technology of photography to freeze-frame action. This visual occurrence, that is too fast for the human eye to process and can only be perceived with the aid of photography, is what Walter Benjamin called the ‘optical unconsciousness’ in his seminal essay ‘A Short History of Photography’.

Flowers, which often symbolise peace, become victims of brutal terror, revealing an uneasy beauty in destruction. This tension that exists between violence and beauty, destruction and creation is enhanced by the fruitful collision of the age-old need to capture “reality” and the potential of photography to question what that actually means. The authority of photography in relation to objective truth has been shattered, but new possibilities to experience reality in a more complex and challenging manner have arisen.

Ori Gersht

Designing for Decay

pictures taken from: http://remnantsofolde.com/2009/03/20/designing-for-decay/

Harmen Steenwyck (1612 - 1656)

Vanitas Still Life Painting

                                                 
Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life

'Still Life: An Allegory of the Vanities of Human Life' by Harmen Steenwyck is a classic example of a Dutch 'Vanitas' painting. It is essentially a religious works in the guise of a still life. 'Vanitas' paintings caution the viewer to be careful about placing too much importance in the wealth and pleasures of this life, as they could become an obstacle on the path to salvation. The title 'Vanitas' comes from a quotation from the Book of Ecclesiastes 1:2, 'Vanity of vanities, all is vanity.'

The Symbolism of the Objects

The objects in this painting have been chosen carefully to communicate the 'Vanitas' message which is summarized in the Gospel of Matthew 6:18-21: “Do not store up for yourselves treasures on earth, where moth and rust destroy, and where thieves break in and steal. But store up for yourselves treasures in heaven, where moth and rust do not destroy, and where thieves do not break in and steal. For where your treasure is, there your heart will be also." Each object in the picture has a different symbolic meaning that contributes to the overall message:

The Skull The Skull

The skull, which is the focal point of the work, is the universal symbol of death. The chronometer (the timepiece that resembles a pocket watch) and the gold oil lamp, which has just been extinguished, mark the length and passing of life.

The Shell

The shell (Turbinidae), which is a highly polished specimen usually found in south east Asia, is a symbol of wealth, as only a rich collector would own such a rare object from a distant land. Shells are also used in art as symbols of birth and fertility.

Books and Musical Instruments

The books represent the range of human knowledge, while the musical instruments suggest the pleasures of the senses. Both are seen as luxuries and indulgences of this life.

The Silk and the Sword

The purple silk cloth is an example of physical luxury. Silk is the finest of all materials, while purple was the most expensive colour dye.

As a symbol, the Japanese Samurai sword works on two levels. It represents both military power and superior craftsmanship. These razor edged swords, which were handcrafted to perfection by skilled artisans, were both beautiful and deadly weapons.

The Stoneware Jar

The stoneware jar at the right hand edge of the picture probably contained water or oil; both are symbolic elements that sustain life. Over the centuries, however, the oil paint that the artist used has become transparent and it is starting to reveal the bust of a Roman emperor painted beneath the water jar (mouse over the image to view). This shows a change to the composition that the artist has made during the painting of the still life. At some stage of the work he decided to swap the more complex form of a sculpted bust for the simpler form of a stoneware jar. This was probably because the Roman emperor was too dramatic an image to be placed at the edge of the arrangement, as it detracted from the importance of the skull as the painting's focal point.
Vanitas' paintings were warnings that you should not be concerned about the wealth and possessions you accumulate in this world as you can't take them with you when you die.

·         Vanitas still lifes depicted objects that had a symbolic meaning: a skull as a symbol of death, a shell as a symbol of birth or books to represent knowledge.

·         Harmen Steenwyck was from the university town of Leiden where artists often used skulls and books as 'Vanitas' objects. You can recognise works from other towns by their specific selection of symbolic objects.

·         Harmen Steenwyck paints his images with incredible realism and astonishing skill. This realism is meant to enhance the truth of the 'Vanitas' message.

·         Ironically the 'Vanitas' style had an obvious inbuilt weakness: the paintings were expensive collectable commodities and as such became Vanitas objects themselves.

Vanitas

Everything flows, nothing remains
Vanity of vanities, all is vanity!
Life is the farce we are all forced to endure.

                                                                               Pieter Claesz - Vanitas

"In the arts, vanitas is a type of symbolic work of art especially associated with Northern European still life painting in Flandres and the Netherlands in the 16th and 17th centuries, though also common in other places and periods. The word is Lating, meaning "emptiness" and loosely translated corresponds to the meaninglessness of earthly life and the transient nature of  vanity. Ecclesiastes 1:2 from the Bible is often quoted in conjunction with this term. The Vulgate (Latin translation of the Bible) renders the verse as Vanitas vanitatum omnia vanitas. The verse is translated as Vanity of vanities; all is vanity by the King James Version of the Bible, and Utterly meaningless! Everything is meaningless by the New International Version of the Bible.
Vanitas themes were common in medieval funerary art, with most surviving examples in sculpture. By the 15th century these could be extremely morbid and explicit, reflecting an increased obsession with death and decay also seen in the Ars moriendi, Danse Macabre and the overlapping motif of the Memento mori. From the Renaissance such motifs gradually became more indirect, and as the still-life genre became popular, found a home there. Paintings executed in the vanitas style are meant as a reminder of the transience of life, the futility of pleasure, and the certainty of death. They also provided a moral justification for many paintings of attractive objects.
Common vanitas symbols include skulls, which are a reminder of the certainty of death; rotten fruit, which symbolizes decay like ageing; bubbles, which symbolize the brevity of life and suddenness of death; smoke, watches, and hourglasses, which symbolize the brevity of life; and musical instruments, which symbolize brevity and the ephemeral nature of life. Fruit, flowers and butterflies can be interpreted in the same way, and a peeled lemon, as well as accompanying seafood was, like life, attractive to look at, but bitter to taste. There is debate among art historians as to how much, and how seriously, the vanitas theme is implied in still lifes without explicit imagery such as a skull. As in much moralistic genre painting, the enjoyment evoked by the sensuous depiction of the subject is in a certain conflict with the moralistic message."

                                                 Adriaen van Utrecht- Vanitas - Still Life with Bouquet and Skull
               

More on "Still Life"

Still Life is one of the most classical works of contemporary art I know. It inscribes itself in art history with hardly any commentary. This is not just a Still Life. It is a vanitas, a particular type of still life developed in the 16th and 17th centuries in the Flanders and Netherlands. Its specificity was the showing of the vanity of the worldly things through often subtle signs of elapsing time and decay. Some of the vanitas had obvious references like skulls, but others yet had simply a watch, or a slightly rotting fruit. Sam Taylor-Wood's work is another step in that direction: the image, beautiful as ever in Taylor-Wood's universe, decomposes itself. By the end, nothing is left but a grey amorphous mass.
On closer inspection, one thing distinguishes this picture from its predecessors. The ball-point pen. A cheap, contemporary object. One that doesn't seem to decay. That is not part of the universal, self-disappearing life. Is it here to stay? This nothingness, this ridiculous signature of us?
This is a poor vanitas. We are more accustomed to rich interiors with gold and crystal. But we don't need more: we got the point. And nothing more is necessary. A simple basket, some light. Time. And a cheap pen. Oh, and lest I forget: an extremely good camera, top of the line, to catch this delicate, beautiful insurgence of death.

A little death

http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SIl9rO9sURE

"A little Death is also about the finiteness of life. It is a still life in the style of vanitas paintings, loaded with transient elements and popular from Renaissance to Rococo. She more specifically joined in with the great French specialist of this genre, Jean-Baptiste-Siméon Chardin (1699-1779). A dead hare is pinned to a nail. Next to the animal lies a peach. The vanitas painting continues here. The corpse decomposes. For a second, it looks as though it moves, but it’s the worms devouring the flesh. Thus, death generates life, life is dependant of death. The hare is also a symbol of sexual lust. There is a self-portrait of Sam Taylor-Wood, in a dandy-like outfit, posing with a stuffed hare (Self Portrait in a Single Breasted Suit with Hare, 2001). Moreover, the title of the video, A little Death, refers to the term French philosopher Georges Bataille used for an orgasm (une petite mort). What does that peach, that keeps so wonderfully well next to the decaying hare, actually mean?"

"A Little Death could easily be discussed as examples of either memento mori - because they remind us of our mortality - or even better, as examples of vanitas - as they speak of the vanity of things (their eventual worthlessness) and especially, of the vanity of people (their aggrandized self-worth). Portraiture should be the diametric opposite of still life in that it challenges the onslaught of time and renders the subject immortal."

"Still Life" - mortality and life’s inevitable transience

http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_embedded&v=MIzXWGcb3u0

"Still Life (2001) has been said to be one of the most classical works in contemporary art. It carved a permanent record for itself in art history with hardly any commentary. This is not just a Still Life. It is based upon a particular type of still life painting that developed during the 16th and 17th centuries in Flanders and the Netherlands. It is part of a classical genre that contains symbols of change or death as a reminder of their inevitability. Its focus was upon confronting the vanity of worldly things through often subtle signs of elapsing time and decay. Some of the older works had obvious references like skulls, but others simply had a watch or slightly rotting fruit."

"This is a very poor reflection of our vanity. We have become more and more accustomed to believing that our feelings of real success and personal worth are to be measured vicariously against the lives of celebrities, business magnates and influential politicians, along with the images that they convey of power, wealth, designer fashions, and rich interiors filled with gold and crystal. But Taylor-Wood’s message is that we don’t need all of that. We get the point, nothing more is necessary. A simple basket, some light. Time. And a cheap plastic pen."

"Still Life (2001) has been said to be one of the most classical works in contemporary art. It is part of a classical genre that contains symbols of change or death as a reminder of their inevitability. The short film carved a permanent record for itself in art history with hardly any commentary, confronting the vanity of worldly things through its focus upon the often subtle signs of elapsing time and decay."

 

change of idea

alter ego

"Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde"

Inspiration for the theme of double personality:

The work is commonly associated with the rare mental condition often spuriously called "split personality", wherein within the same person there are at least two distinct personalities. In this case, the two personalities in Dr Jekyll are apparently good and evil, with completely opposite levels of morality. The novella's impact is such that it has become a part of the language, with the phrase "Jekyll and Hyde" coming to mean a person who is vastly different in moral character from one situation to the next.

Katarzyna Kludczynka

„When trying to define myself I reach for the camera. Looking for my identity in mirror reflections I automatically notice all my selves tumbling in me. Sometimes just two of them show, sometimes four, and sometimes all of them hide behind only one.” 

 

"Internal schizophrenia and the search for oneself is the starting point of the whole series. All these multiplied characters that express various emotional states are really one. Her various personalities try to communicate among themselves and they use a photographic camera to this end. They produce a language of communication known only to them and lead an extraverbal dialogue. Being their prototype and actually being them all at once I also stand in opposition to them at the time of confrontation. Although they are my doing, they escape my control and live their own lives. Faceless creatures that photograph my every move, treat me impersonally and watch me as they do everything else. They keep silent and hang their heads down meaningfully or call - or rather scream - something to me. Do they really take these photographs or do they only pretend to release the shutter? Who are they? Are they really me?"

perceptions

“When I enter most intimately into what I call myself, I always stumble on some particular perception or other, of heat or cold, light or shade, love or hatred, pain or pleasure. I never can catch myself at any time without a perception, and never can observe anything but the perception.” David Hume

David Hume

The term identity is broad and is interpreted differently by various fields of science depending on the accented aspect of this concept. The main domains that exploit the notion of identity are psychology, sociology (cultural and social identity) and philosophy (personal identity). In the philosophical meaning identity means sameness, "identical" is indistinguishable, and the problem of identity is based on the question what makes us one and the same person.

For David Hume, whereas, the personal unity was a kind of fiction similar to that which occurs when we talk about the unity of the nation. In his work “Of Personal Identity” he touches the issue of unique identity, the conditions under which a person is said to be identical to themselves through time. These conditions are known as personal continuity. Stuart Hall writes “Identities are never unified and, in late modern times, increasingly fragmented and fractured; never singular but multiply constructed across different, often intersecting and antagonistic, discourses, practices, and positions. They […] are constantly in the process of change and transformation...” David Hume was the first Western philosopher to unmask this idea of the no-self theory and pointed out that we are never the same person as we were, for instance, 10 years ago.

Hume also criticizes Descartes and his followers who believed in the existence of conscious identity. “There are some philosophers who imagine we are every moment intimately conscious of what we call our self; that we feel its existence and its continuance in existence; and are certain, beyond the evidence of a demonstration, both of its perfect identity and simplicity.“ According to Hume something as conscious self does not exist, he rejected and considered it as a fiction. He says that we are just a bundle of different perceptions that are in a perpetual movement and flux and that there is no moment during conscious life where our perceptions remain constant through time. He divides perceptions in two categories: impressions (feelings, emotions such as love, hate, desire; and sensual impressions so what we see, hear or touch), and ideas which they derive from impressions (imagination, memory and relating different impressions to each other).

exploring face expression

“If any impression gives rise to the idea of self, that impression must continue invariably the same, through the whole course of our lives; since self is supposed to exist after that manner. But there is no impression constant and invariable. Pain and pleasure, grief and joy, passions and sensations succeed each other, and never all exist at the same time. It cannot therefore be from any of these impressions, or from any other, that the idea of self is derived; and consequently there is no such idea.” David Hume (Of Personal Identity)

“The mind is a kind of theatre, where several perceptions successively make their appearance; pass, repass, glide away, and mingle in an infinite variety of postures and situations.” David Hume (Of Personal Identity)

Witkacy (self-portraits): 

unstable identity

I found a very interesting essay about instability of identity:

"The application of identity as an 'unfixed' and 'unstable' state within visual arts. Identity as an 'unfixed' and 'unstable' state. There are a number of complex theories which centre upon questions of identity. There are many issues that need to be considered when discussing this complicated area of study. I propose to examine some of these issues of identity with the support of the work of several artists whom I feel, at least in some part, directly or otherwise, deal with identity as an influence within their work. "Personal identity within philosophical accounts almost always centres on the question of what internal feature of the person establishes the continuity or self-identity of the person through time". (1) Judith Butler, in her book "Gender Trouble" warns us to be wary of considering the subject of identity as if there are set attributes within us that create or control the person we project outwardly towards others. We often believe that within each person there is a true and fixed identity. The theorist Foucault rejected this view. Foucault explained 'identity' as something we communicate to others during our interactions with them, a shifting and temporary construction. Because we interact with many people, from all parts of our society, it is reasonable to accept Psychologist Kath Woodward's proposition that perhaps we actually have more than one identity. And that we can call upon any of these identities at any particular time. Woodward pointed out that identity will need to change in relation to with whom we interact. William James, in his book "Principles of Psychology" (1890), also recognised this need to adapt to circumstances. He said "A man has as many social selves as there are individuals who recognise him and carry an image of him in their minds". For example, many people combine the life of a student, a parent and an employee at the same time. Subtle and not so subtle variations of identity may well be called upon for each of these roles. (2) It would be perhaps wise to attempt to illuminate the difference between identity and personality at this stage. Woodward is keen to point out the often held misconception that personality and identity are one and the same. Personality is a construct of traits, often common to many other people, for example - shy, timid, violent, or self confident. However, identity is perhaps best explained as providing "a link between individuals and the world in which they live," this is the process of association that seems to be central to many of the arguments. (3) Charles Cooley (1902) and George H. Mead (1934) both also agreed with the theory of interaction and attributed the 'self' as being mainly a social construct. William James had also acknowledged this, to some extent, in his theory concerning the 'Me' and 'I', in which the 'Me' is the part of our identity that we wish to show to others whilst he still believed there to be another uncontrollable influence within us which he called the 'I'. James saw the 'I' as the central core of our person. Cooley was perhaps ahead of his time with his "Looking Glass" theory of 'self', whereby he said the self is a reflection, largely from the minds of others. This therefore also being recognition of the social interaction of the process of association. (4) Erikson (1968) defined this process further by suggesting that that association occurs from a young age and continues throughout our development into adulthood. He claimed that identity formation "arises from the selective repudiation and mutual assimilation of childhood identifications" (5) Erikson continued to argue that 'children at different stages of their development identify with those part aspects of people by which they themselves are most immediately affected'. They consciously take what they need and discard what they don't. (6) Indeed, from the moment we are born we are categorised as either male or female and cultural specific sets of roles are enforced to ensure a child follows the accepted norms. But complex gender issues find a way to usurp and revise these carefully constructed role models."

gender, identity

“Lucy Schwob, who created the alter ego of ‘Claude Cahun’, manipulated photographic images of herself as Cahun, costumed, disguised and/or masked, which comprises one of the [twentieth] centuries first coherent bodies of work by a woman artist to call into question the very possibility of a unified self.” (Mirror Mirror, Whitney Chadwick)
“[H]er iconography of a fluid transgendered identity derived [in part] from the Dada and Surrealist explorations of sexuality and androgyny evident in Marcel Duchamp’s (1887-1968) gender-bending reinvention of himself through his alter-ego Rose Selavy. Articulating gender and sexuality as positional rather than fixed , Cahun’s self-representations continually return us to the ways that images, even those based on the most personal aspects of our self-identity, derive their meaning in the world from the complex sets if social and cultural signs ands codes on which we depend to make he world legible.
It is also possible to exaggerate the signs of femininity until it becomes almost impossible to locate a ‘self’ in the artifice of display and surface elaboration.” (Mirror Mirror, Chadwick)
“a restless need for metamorphosis […] her creative work was her form of rebellion against any idée fixe about Woman in general and herself in particular. Boasting about her dilettantism her eccentricity, and her unapologetic ambiguity, she used her work to disrupt ideas of gender, social identity, and femininity that were too restrictive…” (Rice, Shelley, Inverted Odysseys: Claude Cahun, Maya Deren, Cindy Sherman, Massachusetts:  MIT, 1999)

Masquerade & Identity
“Cahun’s oeuvre, with its consistent play with the instability of identity, its frequent deployment of masquerade, its penchant for masks and mirrors, is startlingly close to the terms of contemporary feminist thinking about identity, gender and sexual difference.” (Imaging Others, Rice)
“The notion of gender as masquerade, like Judith Butler’s conception of gender as fundamentally performative, resonated strikingly with Cahun’s work not merely because of the recurring appearance of costume and masks – the self as an affair of smoke and mirrors – but because it appears to enact the most radical part of Riviere’s argument. Womanliness, in Riviere’s account, did not mask something beneath it (say the pre-Oedipal, polymorphously perverse, lost continent if primal femininity) but was itself a vacancy, an emptiness.” (Imaging Others, Rice)

"Without a doubt, it is her self-portraits that have aroused the greatest interest among theoreticians of contemporary culture. Here the artist uses her own image to expose, one by one, the clichés of feminine and masculine identity. Claude Cahun (née Lucy Renée Mathilde Schwob) reinvented herself through photography (just as she did in her writing), posing for the lens with an acute sense of “performance,” whether dressed as a woman or as a man, with her hair short, long or shaven (which was extremely incongruous for women at this time). However, to speak of identity is also to speak, indirectly, of the body, and by the same token, of the self-image that one projects and that becomes social as soon as it is shared.
Unlike other artists – mainly men – who made portraits but never or very rarely exposed their own person to the lens (Man Ray, Hans Bellmer, André Kertész), Claude Cahun was at once the object and the subject of her artistic experiments. This is borne out by the care with which she chose her poses and expressions, the backgrounds she used (fabric, bedspreads, sheets, hangings), and her use of specific props (masks, capes, overgarments, glass balls, etc.) – even if the real focus of the image was still the face. Some of these propositions can be found in the photographs of objects that she began in the mid-1920s and developed throughout the 1930s. The exhibition emphasizes the highly innovative quality of these experiments in which she explores questions and visual and symbolic procedures (staging, superposition of photos, photomontage) that continue her speculations on self-metamorphosis.

Claude Cahun (1894-1954) has something approaching cult status in today’s art world. However, her work was almost unknown until the early 1980s, when it was championed by the research of François Leperlier, after which exhibitions at the Musée des Beaux-Arts in Nantes (1994) and the Musée d’Art Moderne de la Ville de Paris (1995) brought it to the public’s attention. Her life and work (both literary and artistic) bespeak an extraordinary libertarian personality who defied sexual, social and ethical conventions in what was an age of avant-garde and moral upheaval. Among her many photographs, it is undoubtedly her self-portraits that have aroused the greatest interest in recent years. Throughout her life, Cahun used her own image to dismantle the clichés surrounding ideas of identity. She reinvented herself through photography, posing for the lens with a keen sense of performance and role-play, dressed as a woman or a man, as a maverick hero, with her hair long or very short, or even with a shaved head. This approach was extended in innovative ways in her photographs of objects and use of photomontage, which asserted the primacy of the imagination and of metamorphosis. By exploring the many different analyses made of Cahun’s work since the 1990s, and ranging across its different themes: from her subversive self-portraits that question identity, to her surrealist compositions, erotic metaphors and political forays, this exhibition confirms the modernity of a figure that, as a pioneer of self-representation and the poetry of objects, has been an important influence for many contemporary artists.

Metamorphoses of identity and the subversion of gender
This set of photographs, going from 1913 to the end of the 1920s, includes some of Cahun’s major works, in which she staged her own persona, emphasizing disguises and masks, and working through variations on gender: feminine, masculine, androgyne, undifferentiated. Sexual ambiguity is consciously cultivated and calls established norms and conventions into question. In 1928, she even represented herself with her head shaved, wearing a singlet, in profile, or with her hands against her face, or wearing a man’s loose jacket. Some of the mise-en-scènes from this period seem to anticipate contemporary performance."

"Though the mask is generally considered a tool of evasion or concealment, Cahun’s many masks and maneuvers reflect rather than deflect. The artist and the individual are present within each disguise, any one of which represents an aspect of an extraordinarily complex self."

fragmentary soul, eluding identity

"Her autoportraits of the twenties constituted an ongoing inquiry into the nature of her identity and proposed a series of unstable selves, many of these strange texts reiterate the absence of fixity. Early in the publication she poses the essential question of self-definition, only to back off from the possibility of forging any stable self. “Individualism? Narcissism? Of course. It is my strongest tendency, the only intentional constancy I am capable of… Besides, I am lying; I scatter myself too much for that.”

"Cahun admits to being a narcissist—”It’s my best quality”—then tells us “I’m lying anyway. I’m too scattered for that.” “My soul is fragmentary,” she writes, and her autobiography is a series of the writer picking up the pieces, turning them over, and watching them vanish as soon as they are written: “We change at the same time as ourselves.” In other words: no sooner has she pinned down who she is than she has changed again, eluding her own understanding."

split of identity

                                                                           Claude Cahun - Que Me Veux-Tu?

"In Que Me Veux-Tu? a deep personal tension is made visible in a profoundly revealing portrait. An androgynous two-headed creature becomes a metaphor for a splitting of identity. In her writings she eloquently expressed her artistic and philosophical objectives: "Divide myself in order to conquer, multiply myself in order to assert myself."

This, her most revealing self-portrait, shows a sinister 'demonic' head whispering into the ear of its angelic, naively curious, twin. Which of them is speaking the title - "What do you want from me?" - is unclear. But perhaps they both are, and it is the viewer, society even, who is being addressed. For she has certainly received little affirmation about who she is from a society who didn't recognise her 'kind' as sane or healthy. 

This image represents an inner conflict resulting from a profound lack of any external identity cues - which we take for granted. In her art Cahun is creating herself. Becoming human. Figuring things out for herself."

good/evil

Images that inspired my idea:

                                                                                                     Aghast

                                                                                    Claude Cahun

                                                                          Claude Cahun

project proposal

I chose Wall for my module as I would like to learn more about various techniques of presentation and organizing 3D space.

In my project I would like to explore the concept of identity. I will be particularly interested in the inner conflict of ‘good and evil’ which goes on within each of us. Such phenomena might lead to many extreme feelings such as a feeling of identity crisis, double personality or division of identity. It impedes to understand who we really are and to construct a stable sense of self. In my opinion no one has just one identity. The sense of identity constantly changes and is dependent on a state of mind we are currently in. Once some emotion takes over, we discover our other ‘faces’. We certainly learn more about ourselves; however it may leave us feeling divided and confused. In all of us there is a good and evil side and we all fight our own battle in the quest for identity. However more we try to get to know to ourselves, harder it becomes.

In my project I am planning to create a video with stills. I decided to use music in the background as I have always been interested in the relation between photography and music. The use of music might give an entirely different meaning to an image and change a perception of the viewer. Also it can create an interesting atmosphere and intensify our emotions. In addition to it I would like to build an installation. In my project I am going to use two dominant and contrasting colors – black and white as a symbol of good and evil.