Every time I give a slide presentation of my portfolio, I try to update it to include my latest work. Not only does it keep the talk fresh and up to date, but it gives me the opportunity to reinterpret some of the older images and sometimes see things in a new context. Looking at some of the older images with a broader and more developed understanding of the work can provide new insights on what I've done in the past. In preparing for my talk at The Annenberg, I did something I've been meaning to do for a long time...
When I made the image I call "Dead Silences", I was in my second year of grad school. In a critique with 8 fellow students and the professor, one student mentioned that it reminded them of a "Janus" face. Rather than admit that I had never heard of "Janus" before, I nodded in agreement with most of the other students who seemed to understand what this statement meant. I did however research it afterwards, and was surprised at just how accurate this observation was:
According to Wikipedia- "In ancient Roman religion and mythology, Janus is the god of beginnings and transitions, thence also of gates, doors, doorways, endings and time. He is usually a two-faced god since he looks to the future and the past."
The resemblance of Janus in this image still fascinates me to this day, and was only the first of several instances in which one of my images resonated with an unintentional reference.
I had been thinking about this a lot since seeing the connection between one of my recent images and Masaccio's "The Expulsion from the Garden of Eden". For the slide talk at The Annenberg, I thought it might be fun to illustrate some of the other inadvertent analogies that have appeared in some of my work...
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