While most of my classmates started this project with thinking what mask to make, I started by thinking where I want to shoot my photos. There was not much thinking process, I really just stayed with the very first thing I thought of – amusement parks.

For the shoot I had two locations in mind, one is Jane’s Carousel at Brooklyn Bridge Park, you can get really good shots of the carousel even when it’s not operating, along with the Manhattan cityscape; the other one is Luna Park in Coney Island.

From that point on, I decided to make a very industrial mask, but with playful, vivid colors. Initially I wanted to make something that resembles a pair of pilot goggles, because goggles were what I immediately thought of when associating with the word ‘industrial’. I then came up with a color pastel color palette consisting of blue, pink, yellow and green. I sketched out the goggle with these colors. However, I did not like the sketch, as if something was missing.

Fortunately, in one of the seminar classes, the gas masks shown in the slide show opened another door for me. Since one of my goals is to make what strongly contradicts with each other coexist harmoniously and gas masks have a much more intense symbolization than goggles. Gas mask symbolizes industrialization, wars, pollution, evilness, and apocalypse. While the colors and detail design of my mask would be more childlike and playful, I felt like a gas mask would be perfect as a contradiction to that.

I narrowed the color palette down to two colors only, for aesthetics and simplicity. I used pearl beads to replace the bolts to give the mask value and a sense of delicacy. As for the vents, I used organic patterns to contradict with the industrial element of the mask.

Amusement parks are where you find laughters and happiness… but really they are just lifeless, cold, steel bars, programmed to move in the same route over and over again. They are probably super exhausted, they just want to take a break from hearing people’s exhilarating screams… but no people don’t see that, because of the beautiful colors they are being painted over with. Aren’t they, in a way, also wearing a mask? It is as if no matter how lifeless, or even evil something is, as long as you paint it over with beautiful colors, they can seem totally different…. wait, isn’t that what masks are for?