Fictitious Portraits

This photographic triptych, presenting portraits of a youth, hopefully breaks away from computer art as canned novelties and explores larger social, and ultimately, existential issues. This triptych calls into question two of the fundamental myths of Modernism: the scientific objectivity of representationalism, and the creative authenticity of the subject. Through the use of digital painting and montage, by hybridizing myself with others, by creating characters out of clay, anatomical drawings and numerous images of different races, genders, and ages; instead of representing subjects, I imagine bodies, both generic and specific. By creating a portrait as multiple personas, the 'Self' is exposed not as a solidified being, but as the movement and development of social and interior interaction; each expression a view of and onto itself.

By mimicking representational photography, Ficticious Portraits demonstrates that as a label 'realism' is remarkably elastic, and that just like painters, photographers invent rules and schemata for laying down visual signs. Electronic reproduction allows me to use and abuse photography's myth, its privileged claim to the real; to critique the most important invention of modern times - the subject, the Modern notion of personhood.

I am interested in exploring the construction of photographic referents that reflect how we define ourselves socially and individually. I want to fabricate concepts that lie just outside the everyday, which hopefully allow for a rehabilitation of perception and a more honest reflective view of the everyday. By exploring the imagined, virtual space which lies just beyond the real, I want to produce what is social - what can't be seen or heard, but which is behind the appearance of all things. Through digital reproduction I can draw on what is imagined, and write it upon the real. The illusion of photographic authenticity, then allows me to combine otherwise discrete and even competing contexts. Yet, the artwork becomes not a collage of an image, but a collage of reality, represented as a coherent and realistic photographic field.

The 'realism' in my work serves as a revealing mirror into ourselves and our inventions, both beautiful and horrific. These seemingly formal portraits foreground human reality as construction, as the product of signifying activities which play upon the body. In Fictitious Portraits, I hope to simultaneously challenge what the viewer perceives as portraiture, and question the alienation and fragmentation of image from matter, soul from body.