Avatar-Self Drawings (2007)

In 2007, I did several series of drawings and paintings that explored how people represent themselves in online photographs on online social networks. At the time, the Myspace and Facebook phenomena were new developments, and I was endlessly fascinated by the ways in which those who used these websites chose to represent themselves to the world through self-portraits. These profile "avatar" photographs had interesting social, philosophical, and existential implications that I hoped to address by becoming, essentially, a "voyeur" on Myspace, typing randomly chosen words into the friend search bar and scouring through the photos of the resulting member names. I would then use the found images as the basis of a series of paintings or drawings.

The following are a few examples of some large-scale ink, black latex house paint, gesso, and charcoal drawings done during this period.