Update - Artist's statement

Wow! I have no idea how to use this feature properly, but here I am. 

I created hairy at the end of my freshman year and now (as a fresh-faced senior), am submitting it to a group show at the MICA Office of Culture and Identity. I really love this piece and didn't get to share it much, and after the year ended kinda avoided sharing beyond a post on my insta/tumblr in part because of how weirdly written my artist statement was. I'm creating this devlog mainly to preserve the old artist statement as I update the file to include the one of using for the show, which serves more as a reflection of what the piece meant for me and my personal development. Enjoy this version! The only real part that changed is that artist's statement!

:)

(HERE'S THE OLD ARTIST STATEMENT!!!!)

The Flyers of Gy by Ursula K. LeGuin has this focus on transformation. It's painful, terrifying, and has so much risk associated with it. You’re special, sure, but lean into your specialness and you just might lose it. You may look down upon the people below you as you fly above them, aware that the only thing separating you from them is a year of pain and wing failure. Does this transformation build character? How you were you before you got wings? After? Are you you if you choose to fly, or shirk it?

    Change and transformation are facts of life. We and the world around us are constantly shifting. Our mindsets change from moment to moment. Our bodies do too - our cells die out, leaving us with a shadow of our former selves to be rebuilt and rebuilt and rebuilt.

    And yet, we seem stuck on this idea of ‘identity.’ The COVID pandemic, coming soon after a major shift in a communal dynamic and robbing the world of countless lives and livelihoods, speaks a lot to change. We may be seeing the world anew, finding systems of power that we hadn’t noticed before, reflecting on ourselves and our bodies and our mindsets and sexualities to the very nature of our humanity. For me, coming straight out of high school and into my first year of art school, it's become a sort of second puberty, with all the tumult, angst, and pain that comes with it.

    Puberty is painful, it's beautiful, it's romanticized and feared. No one wishes to go through puberty again, but we still find it foundational to the shaping of our identities. People tend to look at their pubescent selves in a way that makes them cringe, though. The past is pejorative, and we try so badly to leave that inexperienced, strange self behind. I myself have had a dark relationship with my past self. I wrestle often with my struggle with intimacy, how that stemmed from discomfort in my childhood. I often think ‘why couldn’t you have been that friendly, happy kid, so that I could be a friendly, happy adult?’ I stress over the opportunities I let fly behind me, the moments I failed to stand up for myself, the injustices I perpetrated, the situations where I failed to protect myself or the people I cared about.

    This relationship with the past isn’t healthy. It isn’t realistic, either, I carry this pubescent self with me wherever I go - as does everyone. And we keep changing, and changing, and changing. We’re stuck on the idea of static identity - in a world filled with people, with this focus on personal brands, on capital, on communities based entirely around consumption and survival. It only makes sense that we’d try to define and preserve the self in the now. We don’t have the time or energy to reflect on how the past is part of the present and will be part of the future. For me, that identity has made me an Other in my own mind. I’m not Indian Enough, I’m not American Enough, I’m weird, I’m the Reader, the Creative, the Odd, the Hairy. I’ve spent more time looking for symbols to identify with than simply exploring myself as I am.

    This piece is an apology to that past self, which I can only really view through the lens of Now. It’s not perfect - I can still be cruel to them, I can still sit and linger on the wounds of the past. But in play-acting my puberty - reminding myself of the growth, change, fear, and hope I had then, maybe I can heal the barrier, tear down the illusion.

    I decided to focus specifically on my hair and body hair to kind of play that idea of identity. I’ve always been a hairy person - I have fast-growing body, facial, and head hair. It affected my body image, by relationship with gender and because of that has become something of an Identifier for me. Because of the speed at which it grows and the tendency I used to have of cutting it when I got too tired of taking care of it I used it as a sort of timer. There are about 12 different ‘scenes’ that I created but I wanted the viewer to only get a partial picture each time they ran through it, only sneaking a couple of glances into my interior life, my relationship with my past self, my body, and who I am now. I didn’t want a logic to how these scenes moved - they’re isolated from each other, only connected by the hair on my body and on my head. I specifically designed it so that there wasn’t a clear order of events. Understanding change is specific to the lens from which you view it. I may see myself as different from my past self in one moment, but the next recognize us as fundamentally the same.

    This Visual Poem follows the many repetitive habits and moments I lived in when I was growing up and began to revisit during the Pandemic. The phrases that transfer us from moment to moment are conversations between my past self and the now - we disagree on some things but we both can still find the beauty, malaise, and the peace in the moments we share.

    Puberty isn’t the only point of change - bodily, mentally, emotionally, developmentally. We are constantly growing, changing, and redefining. It may be impossible to see our past selves as truly us, as we are in the now. But maybe we can be kind to those past selves when we reminisce. Sit and watch the stars together, and thank them for the fact that we are alive.

    Hopefully, a couple years down the line, we’ll do the same for us again.