Half Female, Half Male

For this photo shoot, I was inspired by the music video ''Tous Les Memes'' by Stromae. In the video, half of the singer's face is male and the other half is female. He is playing both the role of the male and female. The song is about relationships and the troubles that come with them. Some verses from the song are 'all men are the same' and 'we deserve better'. In the end love and beauty fades and you are left with trust and respect for each another. I have immersed myself back into my main topic, Androgyny. I wanted to attempt the 'cliche' idea of a half female half male face, but interpret it in my own way, hopefully creating a more powerful and different approach. It was challenging to make one side of my face completely feminine and the other completely masculine. I tried to make it as subtle as possible, yet having contrast at the same time. I also wanted half of the body to be female and the other half to be male, to match the face and emphasize the differences of males and females.

Collaborative Photoshoot- Lolita Fashion

This is collaborative photo shoot I did with my good friend, Melissa Sacco. Her fine art blog can be found here: http://funny-phantom.blogspot.co.uk/ and her other blog here http://pixie-false.blogspot.co.uk/. Since we are both into Japanese culture and fashion we wanted to try out taking some photographs at Hatfield House with lolita dresses that we had recently bought. The photo shoot started quite simply, where we took photographs of each other's outfits and group photos. Towards the end of the shoot we were a bit more creative and tried some more 'abstract' shots. These included us laying down on the stairs and hiding behind curtains. The results were quite surreal and peculiar.

Blurred Face

The inspiration for this painting came from one of my previous works 'Ambiguity' http://hebarena.blogspot.co.uk/2014/01/assessment-finals.html  I wanted to create my own response to the photograph, the way I see and perceive it. The face is blurred because the subject no longer knows who she is. She is confused and trying to find herself again. The red 'tear' symbolizes pain. She is trying to make a decision that is difficult to make. In life, in order to progress, sometimes we need to loose and find ourselves again, almost like a reconstruction. We take what we experience in the past, learn from it, and start anew.

Faceless Identity

The face is part of our identity, without a face, we do not have one. Sometimes we believe we know somebody but in fact we do not, people are not who they seem. We no longer recall somebody we once loved dearly, so our image of that person is blurred, hence the 'faceless' image.  I removed the subject's facial features but kept some of the depth so that there are traces of what used to be there. 

Popular Culture

In this series of photo manipulations, I want to show the obsession we have with popular culture. I slightly altered the facial features without changing the face shape, body or clothes, to give it a disturbing  look. The eyes are widened and the nose and mouth are small, resembling those of manga characters. The  eyes are also widened to show the massive intake of information. We become so obsessed with something,  that we end up becoming or believing we are what we consume. I think this idea works better as a series  than if it was just one image because it emphasizes that it is a mass problem, not an individual one. My aim is  to create even more of these to fill up a whole wall, so that it is almost viral. This will be intimidating for the viewer.

Ambiguity

This is an extract from my dissertation: In the Dictionary of Literary Terms and Literary Theory, Androgyny denotes ‘‘having characteristics of both genders’’ or ‘‘the merging of male and female attributes’’. It can also be a term used to describe ‘‘women who act like men’’, or ‘‘men who dress like women’’, or someone whose physical features make it unclear whether that person is male or female’’ (Graham, 2003: 12).The word Androgyny originates from the Greek word ‘andr’ meaning man and ‘gyne’ meaning woman, referring to the combination of masculine and feminine characteristics (Progressive Thinking, 2011). 

Androgynous people neither look male nor female. They sit in an ambiguous space, somewhere ‘in between’. In the first photograph, certain facial features that emphasize and separate males from females such as the eyebrows and eyelashes are removed. All brightness from the face is ripped away, giving it a cold, eerie look. The second series consists of two photographs, one with eyes open and one with eyes closed. They are blurred so that the viewer cannot make out the image and use their imagination to complete the image.

Puzzle Portrait

“The human race is like a puzzle: Everyone fits in somewhere, it just takes a while to figure it out” - Jen Leaman. 

I thought it would be interesting to paint a portrait on a blank jigsaw puzzle. Initially, I wanted to remove the pieces after I had finished the painting, but instead I decided to do that using Photoshop. 

The Androgynous figure, is like an incomplete puzzle, the subject neither looks male or female. The psychology behind removing the pieces is to show that ''incompleteness''. It was quite challenging to draw and paint my self-portrait without getting confused from the many puzzle pieces. I tried to focus only on the image and ignore them. The colours also reminded me, for some reason, of the colours in Leonardo Da Vinci's Mona Lisa. This could be perhaps that I have been studying him for my dissertation. It also reminds me of the Christian byzantine icons, with a more contemporary approach however.

Overall, I like the concept and may work more with it in the future.