aren't we all kind of playing a masquerade?

When I first started thinking about what I wanted to do for the project, I leaned really heavily towards interpreting the prompt quite literally, and incorporating masks and other sorts of ways things get hidden away. I was looking at a lot of different images...I'd recently watched a Spanish film called The Skin I Live In, which presented the mask in a sort of eerie and creepy yet provocative way. We'd also been looking at Frida Kahlo paintings in another class, and I was really attracted to the way she represented the mask as well, and what it might have meant to her.

The Skin I Live In...Elena Anaya is so beautiful in it. Her feminine features still come through, even with the mask on!








Girl with a Death Mask










Although these are both interesting concepts to me, I realized that none of them related to me personally. And so I thought long and hard about a time when I felt like I had to wear//was wearing a mask. Insignificant though it might sound now, I think the last time I felt like I was wearing a mask and hiding my true self was when I was a little girl trying to overcome my shyness. I was so shy that I remember feeling like no one knew who I was because I couldn't bring myself to act in a way that showed my true colors. I was a rather melodramatic little girl.

I'd started off playing with the idea of the intertwining of vida y muerte...eventually, it sort of morphed into an image that reminded me of swings, something I loved to do when I was little. I haven't decided yet exactly where I'm going to go with it, so I guess we'll just see tonight!