Artist Notes

 

'I feel like my sense of self is melting' is a body of work that navigates the abstraction of identity in Internet culture. Online space presents infinite avenues for self-expression. From Instagram and TikTok, to online gaming spaces like Second Life and The Sims, we can construct the reality that we want to be seen through. These identities can be playful, alien, absurd, beautifying, or as banal as cute furry animals.  This body of work uses Instagram's 'My Story' app to consider how individuals curate, alter, and masquerade themselves through online identity. The artworks explore this by augmenting, decomposing, dematerialising, and de-contextualising the body from its physical form.

 

The exhibition presents a series of self-portraits augmented by various ‘Face Filters’ in the Instagram ‘My Story' application. The portraits have been processed through a layered network of digital and painterly processes of abstraction that translate the 2D into 3D, and then back again. The works use painting to play with the tension between abstraction and representation that filters our Internet identities. Alongside these paintings is a sculptural assemblage of a mannequin wearing a 'selfie suit' in position to take a selfie. This body of work considers how our identity is like putty to be moulded through technology. The resulting works reflect on how we contribute to cultural production and the politics of identity that inspire cultural phenomena such as the 'Instagram Face' aesthetic, and how this leaves individuals with a distorted, phantasmic relationship with their sense of self.

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EMERING 2023 is a biennial art prize for artists under 30 years of age at Gosford Regional Gallery, curated by Jasmine Kean.