Selfie

 

"Masked" Inspired by Arlene Shechet

"Together" by Arlene Shechet

Hello all! My name is Sophie. I am a senior doing my BFA in Ceramics. My selfie is inspired by the work of Arlene Shechet who works in a range of multimedia materials like paper, plaster, bronze, and ceramic. I am most intrigued by the different forms, colors, and textures she creates but mostly by her ideas of how to present the object in a space. I really enjoyed making this mask just by putting together different chunks of clay and freely seeing what shapes come out of it as opposed to my usual work which is normally rooted in realism. 

I have many social issues that I am passionate about however, somewhat selfishly, I do use my art as a means of escapism and to ground myself in the present physical world. I have always created like this growing up and I really fell in love with ceramics as such a tactile and physically involved craft. In the future, I would like to pursue an MFA in Ceramic Sculpture and go on to teach at a university. I'd love to continue to do my own work on a larger scale and really experiment with glaze and surfacing design. 

Susan Sontag Reading:

"In teaching us a new visual code, photographs alter and enlarge our notions of what is worth looking at and what we have a right to observe."

I thought it was interesting how she brought up how photos are dramatically different in subjective value because of the sheer amount of them in existence now. Everyone has a camera with them at all times with iPhones taking pictures of whatever they deem valuable producing millions of images on their own. But with these millions of images, It's difficult to narrow them down to the ones that truly mean something. People are always scrolling back and back in their phone's photo albums trying to find "that one picture" to show someone on a screen. Looking at physically printed pictures evokes a deeper connection with an image when you hold it, it becomes more valuable when it doesn't live in the cloud forever.

"Even when photographers are most concerned with mirroring reality, they are still haunted by tacit imperatives of taste and conscience."

Most photography is used to portray reality however that concept gets complicated when the photographer is considering so many things like composition, lighting, subject matter, angles, and so much more. Someone could take 100 pictures and finally settle on one that they feel best represents their reality and then take it to be filtered and edited. How real is this reality? Or could look at this produced image as a new way to see reality either in a different light or through someone else's point of view?