Preview
Creation Date
2022
Description
Materials: acrylic on canvas
Dimensions: 10 x 12 inches
Project Advisor: Tony Conrad and Rob Neilson
Year of Graduation: 2023
Medium
Painting
Rights
Copyright for this work is held by the artist.
Creative Commons License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 4.0 International License
COinS
Artist Statement
On the left side, you are seeing six Lawrentians. On the right side, you are seeing six Sierra Leoneans. In the middle, you are seeing yourself.
Where do you fit within this composition?
The twelve acrylic paintings frame individuals representing different genders, nationalities, professions, passions, cultures, and expressions. There is no real stylistic line connecting this series as a whole, but some portraits may look more like others to signify people’s similarities despite their preconceived notions of difference. Fundamentally, we are all people experiencing life in the same plane of existence. However, most people and cultures are virtually unknown to us, while others seem to be faces we encounter every single day. The separation between the two groups represents the mental barriers we set upon people from geographically different spaces. Here, you are forced to reckon with this physical barrier of exposure. The mirror in the center symbolizes you as an individual in our simultaneously globalizing and constricted societies. Where do you fit within this composition?
I am a Lawrentian, but I also had the opportunity to immerse myself in Sierra Leonean life for a brief time. Therefore, I have seen the differences and the similarities for myself; I have also seen that people from my community and my home, Puerto Rico, remain uneducated on West Africa as a whole. My aim within this series is to make you feel these disparities, both constructed and actualized.
Where do you fit within this composition?