Spieël – spieël

A self portrait of discomfort

According to photographer Peter Hurley there are four different behaviours that people adopt to cope with the experience of being photographed. There are people that simply own it when they are in front of a camera; they are grounded, confident and happy being visible. Some people pose and become something other than themselves. Others shrink and become smaller in their efforts to hide from the camera. The final group avoids the camera at all costs.

I consider myself an avoider. I feel uneasy and freeze up when standing in front of a camera.  This feeling of avoidance and uncomfortableness creates the foundation of my self-portrait project. By trying to deal with this hyper consciousness of the lens, I created a self-portrait series that masquerades my features in a way that is unrecognizable.

This self-portrait series consists of painting and video that are moving parallel with each other. The oil paintings are self-portraits wherein the original photographs of myself are altered. I digitally change the coding of my self image to create the geometric shapes and colours. This is a way in which to modify a photograph in order to create an image in which I am comfortable with the appearance of myself in the end product. The digital photographs go through various stages of masking and transformation in order to get to the finished oil paintings. These paintings are both the length and width of my body. They can be seen as “mirror” paintings, as they are made to look like a free-standing mirror. But, instead of reflecting the image of the viewer back to themselves, the painting reflects the distorted image of myself back to the audience.

While taking photos, I realized that I gain much more confidence when an item is partially or completely covering my face. I became significantly more comfortable in front of a camera, because of the safety net that the clothing article creates. This insight into how I cope with the uncomfortableness of the camera became the foundation from which I created three characters that handle the difficulties of dealing with the camera.

The characters are visually inspired by the painting series, as they are essentially going through another stage of disguise to hide the original image of myself. Each of the characters are created with a distinct and individual characteristic. One adopts the posing behaviour when near a camera, the other owns the attention, making itself visible to everyone and the third one uses unusual actions to deal with the camera. Through these characters, I can freely move around in public and in front of a camera without any discomfort. Essentially what I am doing in all of the artworks is attempting to hide my face, and possibly who I am through painting and 3D construction of physical alternative personalities.

Video works

Hi! My name is Makka.

My name is Vrikkie with a “V”.

My Name Is Sass.