Advisor: Isak Berbic

The Art of Concealment

Project URL: https://theartofcocealment.wordpress.com/

The Art of Concealment began in January 2020 where I wanted to investigate the world outside of myself, how people have concealed and still conceal themselves with cosmetics and fashion, what drives them to do so, and how this relates to broader political and social paradigms.

As the process for this project progressed so did the COVID-19 pandemic which I felt forced me to redirect my process. Initially, I had hoped to travel to New York City to embark on street photography to gather images of the wonderful pedestrians and how they express themselves through fashion and cosmetics. This option is no longer safe therefore I substituted myself as the subject of the work and this developed into a self-portrait photography and digital art project.

Another challenge was that I no longer have access to studio facilities and equipment at the university. Nonetheless, as an artist you can never give up, you must persist, be flexible, and work with the tools, budget, and access the current situation permits. I have an old microscope, a decent DSLR camera, a functioning PC with editing software, and a somewhat stable connection to the internet. Therefore, I still had the ability to photograph make-up microscopically to create a significant photographic body of work with forms, shapes, and textures captured for their artistic aesthetic rather than the scientific. This collection was then applied to a series of self-portraits in Adobe Photoshop to mask, to conceal, and to cover the subject, myself, in order to, at times, express or suppress the reasoning for concealing one’s self. Some images are direct in their meaning, others are obscure and open for your interpretation.