Experience
My initial intention was to find my unique voice to bring authenticity to my design practice. Through this process I became excited by discoveries of the paralleling dualities between the mind & body, feminine & masculine, external vibrations & internal perceptions, and ebb & flow of life. The modern day designer faces many challenges from the outside world. Image, societal norms, and unspoken codes of conduct are strongly propagated within our culture. If one is not careful they may blindly walk through life without really seeing where they stand within all this outside noise. By exploring, deconstructing, and analyzing my identity both on professional and personal levels, I strengthened my self awareness which has allowed for the authentic voice I was seeking to flourish.
Design
#identity is the project I created as part of my thesis research. It explores image through the contemporary cultural lens of the selfie. I question how much image plays a part in our identities and what messages we intend to communicate. Vanity, attention seeking, self confidence, a shared experience; or is it something deeper in ourselves we are expressing through self image? It is my belief that these identity messages are the same ones we express through our art and design practices, albeit they are more subtle or cryptic to the viewer. I point out a hypocrisy in the controversy over expressing our identities in these different ways, as mixed messages persist throughout our image driven culture. A hashtag “tag” accompanies the selfie portraits to question the symbolic value we place on ourselves as objects.
