I am distinctly interested in ancient art history. Right now, I'm even finding that this inkling of an interest defines me, and is determining my career path, how I look at the world and weigh it's worth.
My senior project draws from this interest, guided by traditional aesthetics. This project draws on references from the romantic tradition of monumental figurative painting, and the ancient Roman-Egyptian tradition of death mask painting. I will create two five-foot by eight-foot monumental-size canvases, which will align across from each other in a hall of close proximity. Within each canvas will reside five or six figures, the same figures in each painting. The figures will be placed in indirect or direct communication with each other with the use of 'the gaze.' The figures stare at the other figures in the painting across from their own, they look within their own painting at each other, and they gaze out and down at the passer-by.
Within these parallel universes will be their own reflections, doubling up once again.
At the end of the hall, as the viewer is forced to stop at a wall, hangs the five or six death masks of the figures in the monumental paintings. Painted on deteriorating wood, with the brightness and freshness of life painted into their skin.
What I am reaching out for is a semblance of parallel worlds, of life and death, reality and identity. The parallelism, the repetition, speaks to the process of the identity search, the striving for one's place in metaphysical spaces, between postures and stages of external and internal examination.
This project is very much still progressing and refining. I began with a straight fascination, I have researched and poeticized this content into a message about the constantly transitioning state of identity. And on it goes...
