This User is Private (seminar studio project 1)

To incorporate the dynamics of visibility and invisibility into the main focus of my project I wanted to explore the meanings of public and private and their associations with power. An idea that I used to convey this concept was to use the pictures of Instagram accounts that I am familiar with and I am allowed to see by the owner’s of the accounts. I decided to paint images that I have seen or viewed on Instagram from friends of mine that they have taken of themselves. This representation of the images plays with the idea of power because the account owners have the power to place certain settings or censors on their images while I have the power to access them and can show them to the public. However, I chose to hide some faces based off of the people who have chosen to make their accounts private. In translating these works to paintings I wanted to see how viewer would react to them being selfies and having an even more intimidate experience with the subjects.

Leave a reply

Skip to toolbar