What If

This colossal in-situ installation expresses one’s inner world of fears and how one can escape it through art. Created for my portfolio class during my last semester in CEGEP, this piece was a cumulation of my technical and research skills learned in college, as shown by its time period of a month and its large dimensions. Some of the research explained during its one hour presentation and 10 page essay, revolved around numerology, the placement and style of each element on the canvas, as well as Plato’s Allegory of the Cavern to name a few.

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This pieces features 4 to-scale ravens and magpie, 18 spiders, 7 snakes, 2 jesters, a life-sized silhouette of me placed behind it, as well as a wax cast of my arm piercing through it. Each of these painted elements represent a type or kind of fear experienced by the human psyche, and represent this world of fear through a puppet-theater-like screen. The elements are then turned into protective symbols on the arm, showing how they were re-appropriated and reversed into positive things once they had left this psychological world. An example would be the spiderwebs trapping the person, tattooed on their fingers, with the spider on their index, showing that they are now the weaver of their own fate. This pieces title’s allude to the fear of leaving the known, but also the potential of growing and doing so.