Constructed Identities
Constructed Identities Statement:
The Constructed Identities project had its first realization on Saturday August 10, 2002 in Atlanta, GA as a part of Shedspace, a series of artist installations in backyard sheds around Atlanta during the month of August. This particular one was in the shed of Sean Borja, a graphic designer for Home Depot and board member of Eyedrum art & music gallery.
The installation is accessed by a log-in sheet on the door which viewers must create an i.d. and password in order to proceed. Once inside, there are four portraits of people from on-line dating services who use particularly interesting log-in names. Their portraits were taken from the site, pixelated, and then translated into six foot by six foot paintings using Ralph Lauren paint samples from Home Depot with colors based on 16-bit computer graphics. One of the portraits is interactive, meaning that the paint chips can be taken off and moved around to distort the image or to create a new image all together.
Picking up where the Charles Nelson Project left off, this project was an attempt to physically represent the process of creating personae and crafting our representations on the internet. In this case, the names that people choose for themselves as the first indicator of personality to a prospective mate are entrances into their way of thinking. Along with the concept of naming, this project deals formally with the idea of painting and the way many of us relate to paint in a non-artistic way. The paint samples that people collect to find a perfect shade of mint green are used as the material for creating an original piece of art work. So these are "paintings" because they are made up of representations of "paint". Yet these representations of paint display their own identity by showing the name of the exact color that they are (Bone Black, Petunia Blossom, Dressage Red, etc).
This project is a continuation of my investigation of the role of traditional painting in a world of new technologies. The digitized image has become such a part of our reality that it is now understood as a visual language. My goal, ultimately, is to make art about our interface with technology using a language that we can all understand.