insta-LOSS

Creating absurdity in a world filled with chaos and unpredictability sustains me in a world full of disappointments. My work is about the pressures mass media places on to society to achieve a specific body ideal that is pushed and perfected through post processing. My work comments on advertising efforts to sell an idea to popular culture that encourages change to fit a specific mold. Through bombarding popular culture with images, the fit and thin body is engrained in our society as the only ideal body. This may allude to obsession and unhealthy comparisons between ‘everyday people’ and those represented as ‘what we should look like.’

My work explores the exaggerated effects of post processing that push us to believe we should fit into a specific body type, but the restraint of not being able to do so because of our genetic make-up. There is also representation of social media or being “plugged in” constantly. Each screen is calibrated differently, just as each opinion from an individual viewing their screen about the image. Cords are weaved in an out of boards to represent being plugged in all of the time, and choosing to reveal or hide specific characteristics from our online presence. These circuits are not limited to just online use, but also the physical circuits we put our body through to get them to be as close to our online persona as possible. The more we are consumed by our online presence, the more we are controlled by the idea of being critiqued on multiple platforms.

Individuals within the Western culture photograph themselves multiple times in a minute, filter through the images to select only one to present, filter that image with an actual post processing manipulation technique, caption the image to frame a facade on the photograph and send it out to the world to be critiqued. Through these filters, each of us is held back from the truth: the original image. We’re aware that these images are not truth, but we ignore the real and take these images as the true image. We are influenced by mass media and commercialized products that sell us ideas every day, which in turn makes us attempt to sell ourselves or the idea of ourselves.

insta-Loss is heavily influenced by Andy Warhol and his pop culture aesthetic. His work inspires me due to his level exaggeration of popular culture. Our definitions of the ideal body continually change throughout time, but if the ideal body cannot even exist due to genetic restrictions, then all human efforts to make it so are in vain, and instead we ask technology to do it for us.