A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl
2016, Drypoint and monoprint
Bargue Study: Left Arm
2015, Pencil
Of Mice and Boys
2016, Engraving: printmaking
24 Hrs Snapchat
2016, Pencil and pen
Snapchat is one of my main modes of communicating with friends. What interests me about snapchat as a medium of expression is that we use it everyday to take and send self-portraits. Many of the snap chats I receive are of my friends making duck faces, sticking out their tongues, or only including parts of their faces in the frame. In my piece, I explore the theme of self-portrayal or -presentation on snapchat. If snapchat is the medium, what’s its message? And how does its message, which involves a kind of self-portraiture and self-consciousness, differ from other social media and communication platforms? With “24-Hours Snapchat” I made a drawing of each snapchat that I received in 24 hours. I used pencil, pen, and paper. Unlike Instagram or Facebook where there is a permanent record of everything you post, snaps only pop up on your phone for roughly 10 seconds, then they disappear forever. By using pencil as my medium, I illustrate the temporal nature of snapchat. However, by going into parts of these drawings with pen, I show that even while snapchat is designed to communicate fleeting images, that it is really up to who receives your image, who could screenshot your snap, if your image or snap will really disappear forever.
I first created this piece in 2016, but decided to revisit it for my Media Theory class this past winter. In consultation with my incredible professor W.J.T. Mitchell and my TAs, I put my initial conception of the snapchat pen and paper drawings into conversation with Marshall McLuhan, Sigmund Freud, and Friedrich Kitler’s ideas about memory. When I first pitched my performance, my TA suggested that I consider Freud’s writing on the mystic writing pad and how it is an allegory of the mind, the top layer perception, and the wax underneath, memory. So, while I presented my work to my class, I passed out mystic writing pads for everyone to draw on and erase while I presented, so that they could link how Snapchat might be akin to memory. When I got the mystic writing tablets back at the end of the presentation, though, they all still had drawings on them. I had thought they might have been erased before being given back to me, and I liked the fact that students decided to keep their drawings. There were not only the saved memories etched into the wax tablet, but ones still on the top layer of perception.
Here, I illustrate and investigate Marshall McLuhan’s major arguments in “The Medium is the Message” by rendering the relatively impermanent digital medium of snapchat into the relatively permanent physical form of drawings. While making, I got thinking about McLuhan’s idea of hot and cool media. Snapchat requires participation. McLuhan points out that a photograph would be categorized as hot media because it is in high definition. In other words, most of the information is filled in for the receiver. However, Snapchat requires participation at its core, which categorizes it as cool media. Snapchat requires both opsis, the images and spectacle of what you see, with lexis, text. The act of participation with Snapchat offers the question of how you want to be remembered.
At the end of my performance, a student asked about how Snapchat was linked to memory. In particular, in the age of #metoo and other movements, how does Snapchat fit into the larger constellation of collective memory in the digital age? There are numerous cases in which celebrities posted something to social media years ago, and now face the repercussions of their actions. For example, Kevin Heart just stepped down from hosting the Oscars because his homophobic tweets from a number of years ago resurfaced, and people thought that he was unfit to host an event in which a large portion of the industry is a part of the gay community. The student’s question made me think about how I can decide how to use Snapchat and my other forms of social media. For instance, I could choose to not have any social media presence during my four years of college. After all, these are the four years where I’m likely to grow and change my mind the most. I have the dangerous potential of posting pictures at a frat party and making off-handed comments that could come back to haunt me. There is a decision, so to speak, about how you want to be remembered and if you want someone to remember you. Snapchat has the potential to be an extension of man, as McLuhan writes about, but also the potential to become more of an amputation to man, at Kittler would mostly likely say.
After my performance, I recalled one of our first classes, in which Professor Mitchell brought up the story of Thoth, the Egyptian God. Thoth invented writing, but the King of Egypt prohibited writing because he was worried that if people started writing, they will lose their power to have good memories. With Snapchat, the King might warn that the memories catalogued by Snapchat will give power to remember only what you screenshotted. The other Snapchats you received might not even register on the wax tablet of memory. Here, you have a choice of what you want to remember, and how you want to be remembered. This performance caused me to investigate how Snapchat is a medium for memory in today’s day and age.
Scene and Heard
2016, Soft Pastel
Figure Drawing
2016, Drawn in india ink using a four foot sharpened dowel rod
Still Life with Death
2016, Pen
Portrait
2014, Pencil
Alice Grown Big (after Annie Leibovitz)
2016, Conté
Nature Lab Study
2016, India ink
Illustrated Lady Godiva (after Collier)
2016, Acrylic paint
Two Sets of Spectacles for Two Thousand Titles
2016, Woodcut in three tones
The Medium is the Mess and Immaculate Containment
2017, First: Soft pastel, Second: Colored pencil
There are two aspects to self presentation, what you highlight and what you hide, what you show off and what you keep contained. I am a fashion blogger, I spend a lot of time thinking about how to present myself. What’s unique about fashion as an artistic medium is that with fashion, you express yourself every day. What I realized about myself, though, in creating these two pieces is that although I present myself as a creative, confident, and put together individual, behind the scenes my clothes overflow from closet drawers and sit in heaps on the floor, acting as a sort of obstacle course for all who enter. It is particularly unexpected that I have an extremely messy room because I spend a lot of time thinking about fashion: how it is personal yet mass marketed, something that is largely thought of as superficial but has the power to inspire, publicizing my outfits and philosophies to my blog. I would be horrified if anyone knew how poorly I care for my clothes, let alone how much of a slob I really am. In my two responses, “The Medium is the Mess” and “Immaculate Containment,” I reveal my sloppy side and explore the idea of self presentation: the conflict between the people we want to present ourselves as and the versions of us that we contain and keep secret.
In “The Medium is the Mess,” I am purposefully not in the image, yet there is a trace of someone weeding through the closet and stepping over the clothing in the foreground. I decided to use soft pastel for “The Medium is the Mess” because soft pastel is inherently a very messy medium. It is always messy to use and often times in how it is executed. With “The Medium is the Mess,” I wanted to create a piece that although obviously a closet, with blotches of color and a contrast of blurred and distinguished lines, becomes resonant of a vivid and colorful abstract piece. I can imagine Mark Rothko and Willem de Kooning squinting at my closet and loving the colors. What could usually be picked out as a dress or a sweatshirt becomes obscured in a mess of color. Despite being confronted by a closet, the viewer does not concern herself with picking out an outfit. What is most apparent is the mess.
“Immaculate Containment” is where I contain the mess. I am dressed in blue. I would like to come off as calm, cool, and collected and so my expression matches. The dress is avant garde and cleanly draped. I imagine myself as a Roman statue at the Met, a dress of almost neo-classical design. It is an easy piece to wear but it always comes off incredibly put together, thought through, and stylish. I drew “Immaculate Containment” in colored pencil to add, as the title references, an immaculate and intentional quality to my contained mess.
“The Medium is the Mess” and “Immaculate Containment” are meant to be viewed simultaneously. These are both a different take on a self portrait. I wanted the two pieces to be the same size, (30” x 44”) so that when hung together, side by side, viewers can draw the comparison between how I present myself, the media I chose, and the techniques I executed. As a next step, I would like to recreate the images represented in “The Medium is the Mess” and “Immaculate Containment” on the same sized sheets of paper, but exchanging the two media, the soft pastel for the colored pencil and the colored pencil for the soft pastel. In total there would be four pieces to expand my concept and further the series. Soft pastel if used on an alternate version of “Immaculate Containment” would become bright, vivid, and colorful. It would be a different interpretation of how we present ourselves, considering how fashion can empower and inspire confidence. To create another version of “The Medium is the Mess” in colored pencil would show the details of each garment and further explore how my clothes are an extension of my personality. The four pieces when hung together would begin to address the complexity of who we are, how we define ourselves, what we project, and what we choose to contain.
Teen Gisele Bündchen Larger Than Life (after Irving Penn)
2016, Conté
Etch, Sketch, Figure, Flesh
2016, Drypoint
