selfie
Sketch of a digital girl (thumbing through the early teens), 2017. Watercolor on paper
I continue to grapple with identity in the digital age. What happens to all of those selfies that we snap and upload all over the place? I can't access my data history on my iPhone 4 and that was less than 10 years ago. But woe to the teenagers of today, who are destined to revisit a public image record beyond their control.
Self portrait in an old mirror. Acrylic on wood panel, 2017
Old fashioned selfie.
Me and My Friend, 2017. Digital sketch
Incorrect grammar.
Consider the physical and software prep work that we do to create our social media presence. As the Internet progressively invades our psyche, online identity is a major component of ego. Are we the same person in physical reality as we are online, or is there a new dichotomy of self? Where is the real me?
A young woman with her phone. Digital photo collage. Kelly Heaton, 2015
An artifact of the Anthropocene era: a young woman with her phone. Artists used to sculpt marble statues from a live model, often a woman of ill repute. Now, artists model statues in Photoshop using pictures of women who post themselves on the Internet. For the record, I made my "statue" from a composite of several women, so it does not represent a real person.
Selfie on the Raft of Medusa, 2015. Digital photo collage. Kelly Heaton
I made this photo-collage, "Selfie on the Raft of Medusa," 2015, after Theodore Gericault's epic painting, "The Raft of the Medusa," 1818-1819. Gericault portrays the hastily constructed life raft of the Medusa, a French naval frigate that wrecked in 1816 killing most of her crew and creating an uproar over the perceived incompetence of the French monarchy. It's one of the greatest paintings in history.
Joseph Campbell attributes the myth of Medusa to "an actual historic rupture, a sort of sociological trauma, which has been registered in this myth, much as what Freud terms the latent content of a neurosis is registered in the manifest content of a dream: registered yet hidden, registered in the unconscious yet unknown or misconstrued by the conscious mind."
Medusa: rage of the feminine principle. She speaks to me right now. She speaks of frustration with human self-absorption, abuse of Mother Earth, dependence on fossil fuels and electricity, and hubris.
Jack London quotes Benjamin de Casseres in 1914: "The profoundest instinct in man is to war against the truth; that is, against the Real. He shuns facts from his infancy. His life is a perpetual evasion. Miracle, chimera and to-morrow keep him alive. He lives on fiction and myth. It is the Lie that sets him free."
