Undoing Reality

    Wangechi Mutu is an international visual contemporary artist born in Kenya and is known for her paintings, sculptures, films, and performances. Wangechi Mutu’s art focuses on themes of gender, race, and colonialism. She depicts black women as beautiful, powerful, and strong figures in her pieces as a way to empower them because historically, black women were rarely seen in art museums. As Wangechi Mutu used the human body to explore identity, I asked myself, how will my art/collage express who I am or who I want to be. For my final self-portrait project, I decided to go for a combination of painting and collage just like Wangechi Mutu. I started off my project with a yellow and orange sunset on an 11in x 14in canvas with acrylic paint and when it completely dried, I pasted on a silhouette of myself I took. Afterward, I cut up some pictures from magazines I had laying around in my house. As shown above, you can see I pasted on someone else's eyes, hair, and body on my silhouette. Wangechi Mutu had said before “My work becomes interpretations of myself or other female-like beings, kind of conquering reality in these very imaginary characters and manifestations" and that was the same idea that I went with for my self-portrait. I decided to let myself choose whatever pieces I wanted without reason, just whatever felt right in the moment. My portrait is a manifestation of my thoughts and feelings and I don't think it's necessary to explain each and every pasted cut-out, that's up to the audience to interpret. The reason for the title "Undoing Reality" is that the self-portrait above is not the version of myself that you would see if you ever saw me walking down the street, but a version I have of myself within my mind and thoughts that I was able to conceptualize on a canvas. 

    In the fourth chapter of The Society of the Spectacle, they've said, "The spectacle is not a collection of images; it is a social relation between people that is mediated by images" which is crucial to remember because the spectacle wouldn’t be a big deal if it was just a bunch of images sitting in the corner with no meaning. What’s significant about the spectacle is how it modifies and distorts social relations; We see each other and present ourselves differently in society, and that ends up distorting our self-image and the image we have of others. So with this project, I decided to step back and "undo" this image of myself within reality and re-present myself in a different light, in a non-realistic manner that will make the audience double take.