Adelia--Identity Project

Sorry everyone, when I posted this Sunday apparently it saved a as a draft and didn't publish. :S

In high school I created a series of prints that revolved around the theme of “identity”— my 17-year-old self thought it would be SO inventive for me to create family portraits using a thumbprint as a medium, as a meta-exploration of myself and us. After some research, I found an artist who had already done such a series. I ended up doing a close study of Chuck Close (hah), and made pieces by trying to recreate his process on a smaller scale. I took photographs of my family members and myself, sketched basic, enlarged versions of our facial features from the photographs, and then used my thumb print as a medium to recreate us. Here are photographs of scans of my original project (the originals are at home in Philly):

In an interview Close noted, “CHUCK CLOSE: Well, the reason I don't like realist, photorealist, neorealist, or whatever is that I am as interested in the artificial as I am in the real. And it's really the tension between, a ripping back and forth between the distribution of flat marks on the surface of a painting I've made by rubbing colored dirt with a stick with hairs glued on the end of it all over some cloth wrapped around some sticks -- it's a highly artificial activity making a painting. And they are made by hand, slowly piece by piece. Not the way a photograph is made or an image on a computer screen, and I love that ripping back and forth. And when viewers confront an image that's nine foot high, hard to see the thing as whole, and they are scanning it, what they are doing is they are doing much the same thing that I do when I paint it, which is seeing the journey that I took to build this image. And I build them rather than paint them I think.”

(http://www.pbs.org/newshour/art/blog/2010/07/conversation-chuck-close-christopher-finch.html)

For this project, I’m interested in creating a narrative, which takes the viewer through the journey of how I construct myself (or a portrait of myself). I plan to use my previously made self-portrait and scans of my fingerprints to create a photoshop animation, which depicts the construction of the image I made of myself. I think I’d like to play more with fingerprints in this illustration, and when my portrait has been re-created, play with pictures of myself and see how I can transition between a print of myself and a photo of myself and perhaps film of myself, to represent…myself. I’m interested in exploring authenticity and representation related to identity in digital media. I’m also interested in exploring how /if this “ripping back and forth” is possible to achieve via digital representation (despite the fact that it is a more indirect medium than painting, as Close describes).

(Depending on how this goes, I would like to extend this to incorporate more family members, as I have prints of each of my immediate family members, but I’m going to start with this. I would like to do this, as it was uncomfortable enough to create a self portrait several years ago and I imagine focusing just on myself will be similarly uncomfortable, and more importantly because I attribute a lot of my identity to my family... but I'm worried about time. My family will all be here for Thanksgiving so I have an opportunity to include new footage of not just myself, but perhaps them as well.)