Myspace Friend Search: "Lonely" (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 is one of those series.  In October of 2007, I typed in "lonely" and found myself fascinated by the images of a young man who had posted self-portraits taken with his new (brand new at the time) iPhone.  The young man went by the name "Lonely One" on his profile, and certainly seemed to be advertising himself.