This mini-series plays with fantasy and self-perception by subverting the viewer’s gaze and challenging them to redefine their view of the subject. I wanted to visualize a constant shift and transformation from one thing to the other.
Within the project, I wanted to explore the relationships we keep with ourselves unconsciously, as well as the interplay between what we are and what we have the potential to become; I wanted to engage the viewer in this same evaluation, and implore them to question their own cognitive interpretations of the subject and their inner complexities. Self is neither singularly defined nor fixed.
As an eighteen-year-old girl, I’m learning to accept that my sense of self will shape itself in the context of experience and time, bending shape and twisting form. Our more formative years are usually punctuated by uncertainty and insecurities, our sense of being unmoored and adrift. It is all too easy to find yourself swept away in the current, hapless to the powerful tides of a reality you have less and less control over.
There is a fear there, a fear in letting ourselves go in a way that makes us vulnerable in our self-exploration. But there is also a great relief in finally breaking through that self-imposed barrier.
Humans are like the rolling waters of the oceans. Visualizing these saturated tides, we take the form of dripping hues and shifting planes of self-awareness; we become color and coalescence and sundering. Our eyes take in the tides of our self in a kaleidoscope; we are prismatic, we are refracting light.
By Erin Davis
Modeled by Isley
