self serve (2013)
The ‘Eyes of the Beholder’ collection speaks directly to the obsession with self image, and ‘Self Serve’ in particular responds to the overwhelming dominance of ‘photo-face’ in our online culture.
My primary intent behind this experiential artwork was to give the participant ‘manual/analogue’ control over how the manipulation of their image might be processed. As someone who had spent many hours considering the multitude of variables of light-play upon faces, and the subsequent critical reading by an audience of those images, I thought to cut out the ‘middle-person/photographer’ and offer some of the variables of self presentation in realtime, directly to those whose image was being captured.
5 buttons in front of the participant offered a vast variety of lighting plots with which to select from. Their choices changed the way their reflections looked back at themselves, and how they reacted to these images.
This action and encounter constituted the art experience, the subsequent photography is the documentation of this.
NB: as with all of my ‘Eyes Of The Beholder’ image sequences, the images are presented in chronological capture order so as to avoid any potential of creating a narrative by placing particular images next to each other.
working drawings
