Self Portrait

While thinking about my self-portrait I had many ideas on what I wanted to do but instead of doing a physical art piece, I made a self-portrait on one of the most important things to me. Everyone likes to watch movies it is not a special thing by any means however, looking back on the readings I thought to myself what makes my sense of self or experiences. While thinking back about Ta-nehisi Coates’ writings, I began to wonder what parts of my life shape me as a human. It is my friends, my family, and my peers that all influenced to become the person I am today. A community that I hold very dear to myself. One activity I always do with those people are watch and enjoy movies together. During the quarantine all I could think of was missing my friends. Marathoning movies together is pretty much our number one activity. Just hours and hours of watching any kind of content. That is why I decided to put a collage of my favorite movies of movies I thought were influential to me while overlaying a self-portrait I did back in high school.

During my senior year of high school, I took and AP Studio Art course. In that semester one of our projects was to do a self-portrait using a style that we developed ourselves. I made it into weather map-like style. However, it is not the work itself but one of my teacher’s that taught. While figuring out what I wanted to do for college, I talked to my teacher and I had a really tough time deciding. After doing another project with type, he advised me about going into the graphic design field. Before that I was thinking of going into being a STEM major because that is what I had to do to be successful. He taught me that if you do what you love, you’ll eventually find a way to be successful. So, after taking a semester of bio courses in college, I thought back to those words and changed what I wanted to do in life.

All these movies have a reason was to why they are there. Every single one of those I have clear memories of watching with my friends. Along with those memories the actual stories are what resonated with me too. For example, the movie Parasite. Me and two friends went one random night to the movie theater and went to go watch a movie we had seen no press about. It was back in November and at the time Parasite was only being shown in a few select theaters and luckily out local one was showing it. All the events that happened in that movie shocked me and my friends and for weeks, that was literally the only thing we could talk about. Also, the lesson of that movie being about societies issue with poverty and how the rich treat other differently also opened my eyes more politically. Thinking about the title of the course, imagery, identity and culture, I think these movies all fit the bill. The imagery inspires me to create. The relationships I have with the stories of the movies and my friend shape my identity. And these movies all have lessons that either can change or reflect culture.