Kurasawa’s Rashomon famously engages with the discrepancy between perception and recollection, ultimately putting to question the nature of reality. Is reality subjective?
The mutability of reality is central to the consideration of persona. We are forced to question whether appearances accurately communicate the reality of a personality, or whether what is on the surface can truly be deceptive enough to invalidate itself, making it nothing if not unreliable. For ultimately, everybody processes imagery different, making each experience one that can never justly be recreated for the next in line. If then, to what degree does an appearance speak to an identity?
In these photos, I play the role of a victim placed in bizarre but not improbable and eerily familiar locations. I had hoped to create a character that was placed in uncomfortable situations, which asked our minds to recall images that we had seen before. Yet these scenarios lacked just enough context, thereby making the image foreign.
Alienated from truly connecting and understanding this arbitrary persona, we try to relate them to what we know without realizing that we are trying to do the impossible. Essentially we futilely attempt to drag out from under the surface the very subconscious that we cannot understand causing us to conjure up anything and everything that can make tangible the intangible.
In the end, persona becomes the tool to expound upon the problem of façade and reconciliation of the unknown with the known by our minds. We launch a confusing dialogue within ourselves. In generating an anonymous character feigning death—the perennial victim— I beg to question: Do you believe it, does it make sense, how does it make sense… or have I simply articulated artifice?
****final print did not have the shadow
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