Graduation Project - "Armor of Lies"

For our final project, we were allowed almost any medium we were interested in. I decided to go back to my niche: spray paint and stencils. I first started using these tools a couple of years ago for leisure actually. I was simply passing by an art store and was interested in this style that was often mocked or belittled as unsavory compared to traditional mediums. While the broader theme of our project was "Horizon", my personal subject is the distortion of human perception. Specifically, drawing inspiration from my childhood, the feeling of being seen by a distorted lens. When I was growing up, I was constantly compared and belittled compared to my older sibling or my cousins. I was seen as a statistic rather than as a person of my own. People are always measured by their accomplishments and awards, not who they are or what empassions them. This artwork has for goal to mock this idea, this reality that we adopted. I wanted to demonstrate how absurd the baseline for human interaction is. In the end, I was extremely satisfied with the end result as it appeared as a cumulation of my time spent training myself to use spray paint.

The first frame of the triptych, it represents an unnamed man carrying a large trophy to the golden idol in the third frame. The trophy, doorway, man and background were all made with stencils, while the shadows were made freestyle. This one is probably my favorite of the three.

The second frame of the artwork. This one is relatively tame compared to the other two. At first, I was rather unsatisfied with the emptiness of the frame. It incorporated very little elements. I even considered removing this frame altogether. However, after playing with shading and light a bit more, creating a window to let some moonlight enter the scene, I was captivated by this feeling of transition. It can be noticed that the background and scene become blurrier after the ray of moonlight that passes. This element gives the illusion of walking into a dream as aspects of the environment become less and less defined. This offers a certain serenity in the triptych, a sort of moment of calm as the two other frames are drowned by noise.

The golden idol. I was heavily inspired by Mary Shelley's "Frankenstein" as the scene displays a man completing his ultimate creation. This frame contains a golden mech. This entity is supposed to represent this illusion we hide behind. This mech is the representation of that distorted lens. It is how people see others: an outside layer that boasts all that person has accomplished but overshadows completely the person hiding inside.

Armor of Lies (Spray Pain on Wood Board, 24x30 In individually or 72x30 if all three, 2019)

Originally, the idea of making the artwork a triptych was born from a purely ergonomic desire as it would make transportation much easier. However, after completing the artwork, I was surprised to see a sort of sequence happening due to the division. This separation created offered a coherent story by giving an order. The amount of time put into this end result can be divided into three clear blocks: the initial nine hours during which I rolled around in my garage and staying up all night, three hours of editing after some feedback from classmates, and 2 hours of further editing after asking for some family members'opinion. Stencils were used to create shapes such as the man or the idol.