“mental health”

DIGITAL PHOTOGRAPHY + illustration; 08/2020

THIS PIECE WAS A PART OF MY semester PROJECT, FOR MY high school PHOTOGRAPHY CLASS (ap 2d art and design, 2020 junior year, INSTRUCTED BY brian guilfoyle).

For this project, we were assigned to choose and develop an overall concept and create 15 concentrations. My concept was “Youth”

Artist statement:

these photos are arranged to be a visual of the inside of my mind. I have struggled with mental health since late middle school and I have always imagined the inside of my mind to be a stormy grey. My mind is almost always clouded with intrusive thoughts which seem to attack my persona internally. Due to these thoughts, I often find myself feeling like I'm not alone in my own head and placed in a permanent state of anxiety. I lowered the exposure as I wanted the piece to get off a menacing vibe as well as messily colored over the faces in the middle photo in order to emphasize the feeling of dissociation. When dissociating, I feel like I am living in a dream and nothing is real, including myself. All thoughts become irrelevant, thus the messy blurring out of the model’s head. I experimented a lot with color for the messy blur as I wanted the color to express a feeling of intensity but not stand out too much. I bounced between white and maroon and in the end I think the maroon ended up contrasting better with the dark green in the background. I added a looming figure in the back of the middle photo as I wanted to add an element of not feeling alone within my headspace. I had revised this figure about five times to get it to express as accurately to my emotions as possible. I also split the background photo in half in order to really emphasize the odd feeling of detachment that I struggle with. I find this piece to be extremely personal as it is a look into my own conscience, therefore it was a bit difficult to put together. I wanted this piece to be as accurate as possible in terms of the energy it gave off to the receiver. 

Mental health remains to be one of the biggest threats to our youth today and a huge part of my life. Despite the hardships, however, I believe that I will be able to overcome my struggles stronger than ever.