I as Frida - Katia

 

The artist I chose was Frida Kahlo because of her courage to do what she loves best. I chose her for her determination to be unique. She defied gender stereotypes. Frida smoked, boxed, won tequila challenges against men, and dressed like a man in a family portrait, contrasting to her mother and sisters who wore dresses. She refused to alter her “masculine” features, including her mono-brow and a faint mustache, and she exaggerated these features in her self portraits. She painted real women and real experiences.  Frida has become an icon of the people because of her unique personality and the way she carried herself with so much fearlessness.  

“I used to think I was the strangest person in the world but then I thought there are so many people in the world, there must be someone just like me who feels bizarre and flawed in the same ways I do. I would imagine her, and imagine that she must be out there thinking of me, too. Well, I hope that if you are out there and read this and know that, yes, it’s true I’m here, and I’m just as strange as you.” - Frida Kahlo 

I’m not an artist, that’s why I’m a Criminal Justice major, so the reason I created sort of a self-portrait inspired by Frida Kahlo was to create something that I'm not used to. I used inspiration from Kehinde Wiley’s flower background to incorporate a colorful backdrop.mIn my painting I placed both the Dominican Republic flag and American flag to show where I come from like Frida used her culture in many of her paintings to show her audience whom she was. The materials I mainly used were paint and Ribbons to create my natural curls in a 3D way. It was a new fun material that I used, that I did not use in my past portraits. My portrait is not as perfect and artistic as I would've loved but my art could show the audience to always see herself where you want to be. Fridas Vogue's look inspired me to one day embrace my natural self for the world to see and be unapologetic about it. Social media enables identity expression, exploration, and experimentation; something natural for the human experience. It is the agencies in real life, which provide a source of names for different sectors, that inspire the internet communities and the interactions they make within themselves. 

This pandemic has changed the way we all think. It has changed our ways of living.  Throughout this pandemic, I have re-evaluated the way I think about my future, where I am, and where I want to be. It has taught me to live life at the moment and enjoy the memories later because life can change in a matter of seconds. 

The Society of the Spectacle 

“The images detached from every aspect of life merge into a common stream in which the unity of that life can no longer be recovered. Fragmented views of reality regroup themselves into a new unity as a separate pseudo-world that can only be looked at. The specialization of images of the world has culminated in a world of autonomized images where even the deceivers are deceived. The spectacle is a concrete inversion of life, an autonomous movement of the nonliving”.