I saw—with shut eyes, but acute mental vision—I saw the pale student of unhallowed arts kneeling beside the thing he had put together. I saw the hideous phantasm of a man stretched out, and then, on the working of some powerful engine, show signs of life and stir with an uneasy, half-vital motion. Frightful must it be, for supremely frightful would be the effect of any human endeavor to mock the stupendous mechanism of the Creator of the world.
Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1831)
This was a final project my freshman year for a class called “Color, Material. and Light“. The prompt was to create a self portrait using uncommon materials, and we were free to use the term ‘self portrait’ as liberally as we chose.
I based this work on my own student ID cards, and drew inspiration from Dada artist Hannah Höch when making this piece. She, among other Dadaists, pioneered the world between distinctly high classical and lowbrow commercial art. Using these themes, I aimed to weave the narrative of balancing myself between these two hemispheres as a student of Fine Art.
