Series “Tumblr Selfies”:
Portrait
Digital painting/collage
31.5″ × 31.5″ (Image)
800mm × 800mm (Image)
C-Type Fuji Pearl mounted Aluminium
The series “Tumblr Selfies” is an investigation into society gender stereotypes and current social media user’s obsession with selfies. With this series I set off to challenge the taboo around graphic depiction of genitalia, which in many mainstream online social platforms has led to the absurdity where an artwork of a nude is censored and considered inappropriate, while violence, hate, fake news and bigotry seems to be acceptable.
The compositions have all the same visual structure: a selfie, a cover of a gender biased pulp literature from the 50’s and an ancient erotic object from across different cultures. Each composition has something to tell and is not for the faint hearted. You want to leave your indoctrination outside of the picture.
Worth noticing in this series are the colour palettes that have been adjusted specifically for people with protanopia colour blindness, which is characterised by a difficulty in distinguishing red and green colour shades. To that end I worked with my partner, who has protanopia, to help me adjust the colour spectrum of my artwork so that he too would be able to distinguish better the figures from the background. I wanted to help others with similar perceptual colours shift to be able to enjoy my work.