Masked Idenity

Assignment:

Through the making of a sculptural head piece and imagery, compose a visual narrative that offers clues to your identity without showing your face. Or you can interpret the term "masked identity" in another way and make sculpture and imagery that conceals your identity.

Use materials that emulate skin and skeleton (trace paper and wire) to construct a head piece.

The constructed head piece needs to cover your face, head and shoulders.

Once the form is complete, video or photograph yourself (or someone else) wearing the form.

Imagery should be meaningful and demonstrate a narrative.

Consider all formal and conceptual components when staging photo/video.

The final solution for this assignment is photography or video.

Upload/post on your class blog.

Objective:

Development of an idea that challenges student to conceive and execute in multiple processes.

Develop visual work with content and meaning significant to the student.

Materials:

Wire, wire cutters, safety glasses, tracing paper, gel medium, brushes, cup with water. 

In-Process Work:

Complete:

Final Composition(s):

Statement:

The masked identity assignment was the most enjoyable and self-expressive project thus far. It allowed me to visually define who I am. I decided to create a dragon mask to represent fantasy, an element of creative idea which holds a great deal of meaning to me. We all imagine wishful things or create wondrous impossibilities within our minds which we desire to make real. For me, the fantasy was quite literally, Fantasy. I lost myself very young in far off worlds held between the pages of a book or within my own mind. Magic, dragons and great quests were but only a few things that held appeal. Soon, that appeal turned into a desire to create, to shape a world beyond imagination. I wanted to write. And so I did…And so I do. The dragon mask represents the fantasy both imagined and kept in the written word. My earliest flights of fantasy, so to speak, were about dragons. My favorite books growing up and still to this day, often include dragons. The dragon to me is a complex and fascinating creature. It can be as small as a flow petal or as large as mountains, some whisper natural magic and others are all forceful strength, but at heart, all are powerful. All have adapted to the world in which contains them. And so I made a dragon mask. 

And so I feel it represents me.

And so, many of my final pictures play on my own vulnerability hidden behind the mask of something stronger…something imagined. A strength found in fantasy.