Snake Eyes

Snake Eyes is a painting I made in college that is a little over seven feet tall and eight inches wide. With this piece I wanted to tell a story of two people. I wanted them to meet and understand and argue and love unconditionally one and other. The chance of rolling snake eyes with two dye is rare just as a relationship is. The black lines are snake eyes stretching all the way through the three panels. I wanted to incorporate the idea of change and the idea of conflict. The center panel is a conflict within the relationship, they get too wrapped up within each other. Then they go back to normal and live out their lives. I made the center piece able to be taken out and the two can live a shorter, less complex life. But sometimes the things that are the best in life come with some complications.

Personal Oppression

With this painting I wanted my central focus to be scale. I wanted to mess with the idea of mental weight and how ideas and thought occupied space in our heads. This series is a story of my freshman relationship with food. The biggest piece in this set is titled “The YMCA” it is an abstraction of the glass that overlays the pool. I grew up a swimmer and have always led a very active lifestyle, so the YMCA was a big part of my life. It was a beautiful part of my life for a long time but after too long the colors started to blend and meld into a gross overwhelming green light in my head telling me to “keep going.” The gym became my main focus in life and felt like all I could think about. Occupying much less of my brain we can see a [veggie]burger and lemonade, both very colorful paintings, with red backgrounds. These two foods I thought about a lot, because I was hungry often. The little voice in my head had lots to say about those too. Those were bad foods, foods that contained too many calories for me to maintain my less than nourished body. The smallest of all the paintings we can see is a black and white bunch of bananas and a jar of overnight oats. I found myself eating these foods every day. They were “good” for me, but their permanence in my day to day made them so dull to me.

Digital Identity

With this piece I wanted to make something out of pieces of another. Similar to how Frankenstein made his monster out of distinguishable human characteristics to make something that is not inherently human. I think this idea is conveyed well in ‘Digital Identity’, showing parts of my models face that look like they could match but somehow don’t. This is a reflection of how I see the Internet and the prison of the person I am on it. Just because something looks to be a certain way does not make it so.

Dreamstate

Dreamstate comes from my nightmares. I have an irrational fear of zombies and they tend to be a staple in my nightmares. For this project I wanted to create a soundscape that feels like a full 360 degree nightmare, and what it feels like to fall back into it.

Point of view

“Point of View” was influenced by many different things; Black Mirror: Bandersnatch, Lund, and The Stanley Parable. In the song“Broken” by Lund (2:16) there is a sample of a quote by Alfred Armand Montapert, a famous american author, “we cannot choose the things that will happen to us. But we can choose the attitude we will take toward anything that happens.” I really enjoyed taking apart this quote and thinking about what it means to me. For Point of View I wanted to help express my analysis of the quote. That being that the only thing that we are in control of in our own lives is our attitude and perception that we take from what happens to us. We have the illusion of choice but we do not actually have free will. The name of the game is influenced by the definition of point of view: a particular attitude or way of considering a matter. Wrapping up the game quite nicely.