MARI AMMAN, REAL SELF IMAGE

REAL SELF IMAGE, 2015, iPhone, Instagram Social Media Filters, poetry. The images were made to be scrolled through on a screen to draw attention to the cultural fixation on identity and image. A hoodie with the word “REAL” is worn on the self-portrait of the artist wearing a sea-salt paste over the face. Both water and salt are repeated elements in the works of artists, in their complex compositions and relationships to commerce and trade. Salt and water are among the most common, abundant resources on earth. Placing such commonplace materials onto a face with the Passport Photo expression points towards globalist movements promising liberation at expenses born of technocratic idealism. The scrolling aspect of Real Self Image aims to evoke reading and writing in a scroll format, contained in everyday devices commonly used for presentation of concepts as timeless as the certitude of death. While The Art of Face Mask Changing is considered a national treasure in China, social media masking performs a differentiation on ancient ritual. If Identity supersedes Real, and Image supersedes Actual, the terms of value in life invert the values understood to be generative of life. The way someone or something appears may change the way they are understood by the viewer, but does not necessarily change what was actually there. The upside-down, single-reflex apparatus photography was built on suggests turning things upside down, to look again, versus affixing materials or meaning to chromatic shades of spectral value. Tonal image-masking as having an ascribed value or meaning, serves as ‘coloring book’ techniques in social media landscapes. The word Real is used to establish something existing in the world. An image posited as real and readily understood becomes jurisdictional in use to represent or falsify a story. Images remain contained within a linguistic framework reconstituting an impression of an actual impression. Photography’s relationship to the referent drastically changed with the advent of digital imaging technology. Manipulation became increasingly prevalent, transforming the underlying method of image making into a form of painting. Image manipulation has been around long before photography. However, the apparatus of photography facilitates inquiry into structures of falseness and accuracy. From the 2000s onward, unreal, would be almost impossible to pin down. Therefore, Virtual, Tactile, Projected, and other words suggestive of qualities come to rescue conceptions of Real. Real Self Image looks at looking, and points towards the logical errors and oversights possible in reading an image, particuarly that of the Identity Portrait. As Cletus Dalglish-Schommer described the art movements in his course of Conceptualism in Post-Modern Art at Otis Grad Fine Arts, “trust me art”, implies trust, not only in the visual creations themselves but in the words affixed to the creation’s history. For an artist to say: I am telling the truth, will most certainly be met with: “there is no truth,” “there are only many truths,” or “art is a lie that tells the truth.” Real Self Image is an attempt to point simultaneously toward the image and the viewer and ask: who decides?

Real self image, 2015. Scrolling touch screen installation.

chrome image

fade image

green image

instant image

mono image

noir image

none image (original)

process image

real image

tonal image

transfer image