“We Carry It All with Us” is a mixed media acrylic & paper collage. I chose red and blue and black and white colors, as I wanted to pull feelings of sadness and anger, a duality. I think the red & blue colors together bring forward a conflict, a felling of frustration, possibly dread. I think black and white together present feelings of only two options, a binary, often contradictory.
It has a lot going on visually and that was purposeful. I wanted the viewer to feel the subject was broken, fragmented, at odds with self and surroundings. I wanted you to feel that they are burdened, like a great weight hung on them from being abused and used. The red tears represent those we kill or harm, often unknowingly, with our choices. The blue tears are just what they seem, tears of sorrow and loss.
I wanted the tattoos on their face to look like corporate barcodes. There are so many of the tattoos they overwhelm the face. I think the most compelling of those is the one covering their mouth. It looks like it silences them.
I wanted their eyes to be empty, almost a void of their own. To me they look like swirling spheres of pent up anger and hate, crystal balls into their soul. They look as if they were created by the Borg, nonhuman, perhaps technology of some kind.
I wanted to air around them to look polluted, uncomfortable to breathe, even hostile. I also wanted to convey a feeling of the virtual word and real word converging. The ones and zeroes of a virtual world interacting with an incompatible biological world.
If you don’t feel good about this piece I get that; I’m not sure I feel any good things from it. But that’s really the point.
See the piece from the beginning …to the end, below, in the swipe comparison graphic.
