An Artist's Statement and Some Old Work of My Own

Here are some images from the series I did back in 2006-07.  Understand that this was a time when Myspace was still a big deal and Facebook was only just beginning to grow in popularity.  I'm posting this so that you can see an artist's statement as related to the work it accompanies.

First, here is the artist's statement that accompanied the series:

Erased Avatars

I am interested in how we, as human beings in the digital age, present ourselves to the world through self-portraiture.  Particularly fascinating to me is the phenomenon of Internet socialites using, as a stand-in for their "selves", digital photographs taken of either by pointing the camera or phone at a mirror or by holding it at arm's length and pointing it back toward themselves.  When examining these photographs, I often find myself learning much more about the person from the surrounding environment in the image than I learn from the particular way in which he or she has chosen to "present" his/herself.

This series of images explores this fascination of mine.  It consists of digital self-portraits mined from Myspace.com that have been re-appropriated. Each image originally existed as the online representation of a cyberspace socialite. As such, the image acts as the Internet “body” of the self-symbol; or "avatar-self". In these manipulated images, the supposed subject of the photograph, the human figure, is erased; it’s only evidence a rather ambiguous silhouette. Thereby, everything patently human in the image is removed, leaving only the objects, camera, and implied mirror that surround, inform, and signify the blank space of the figure, the perceived locus of the elusive “self”.