The intention of this project was to represent a fellow classmate to the best of my abilities by means of five portraits.
A person is an extremely complicated being inhabiting a physical and mental space, constantly evolving based on prior experience. A person is a complex system, who can never be completely understood, because they don’t completely understand themselves. It is especially impossible for a person to be understood in a few weeks. Hence, going into the project, I decided to let go of the need to know and understand everything, and fear of missing details, tried to check my personal opinions and biases about things at the door, and enter the conversation with an unfilled mind. I tried to portray Nicholas in a manner that was unbiased and using medium and content generated from our conversations.
I used five different media- photo montage, video, gif, a faux ice cream tub, and a photograph sandwiched between slabs of plexi glass cut to the exact same size. All of them except for the gif, were accompanied by a song, that added to the ambience of experiencing them. Save for the video and the gif, the portraits were exhibited as performance art and I encouraged the viewers to manhandle them, and also taste something before watching the photo montage. The reason I used so many media of expression, that don’t seem to relate to each other. but also convey an unconventional sense of order, to portray Nicholas is because I really to wanted to emphasize my opinion of humans being extremely complicated, complex, unpredictable, somewhat self-contained systems.
This project was exciting to work on because I really enjoy conceptual projects that are flexible in terms of how the concepts are communicated. Also , I learn a lot from it, because I used techniques that I did not have enough experience in to be completely comfortable with.
