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Self-Portrait

Self-Portrait (2002) questions purity, identity and identification, consumer culture, as well as the use of skin color as racial signifier in the United States. The work displays Ralph Lauren paint swatches arranged in a grid and held between two sheets of transparent acrylic. Together, the colored swatches form an image of the artist’s face. Self-Portrait is not only a representation of identity in terms of the artist’s self-image, but also a symbol of how people unknowingly frame their judgments using a limited palette.

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Read more about Self-Portrait:

Introduction

Self-Portrait displays 289 Ralph Lauren paint swatches arranged in a grid and held between two sheets of transparent acrylic. Together, the colored swatches form an image of my face. However, Self-Portrait is not only a representation of identity in terms of self-image, but also a symbol of how people unknowingly frame their judgments using a limited palette. The work hangs from the ceiling and is viewable from both sides. The back of each color swatch is labeled with the Ralph Lauren logo, the color category, color name, numeric code, and a disclaimer about color quality variation. The paint swatches used in Self-Portrait are artifacts of consumer culture. The swatches have no exchange value; they are free samples designed to sell paint. I collected them from the Ralph Lauren paint displays of several Home Depot stores. In light of the cultural production power of the advertising industry, Self-Portrait inverts these advertisements as art and as critique. Self-Portrait questions purity, identity and identification, consumer culture, as well as the use of skin color as racial signifier in the United States.

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Resolution

Self-Portrait is a low resolution visual image. Resolution refers to the amount of visual detail available for someone to recognize an image. In this piece, the image of my face was abstracted into a low resolution grid of paint swatches, with about 1 swatch every 3 inches, or 0.33 ppi (pixels per inch). The original image was a digital photograph resolved at 72 ppi, more than 200 times the amount of visual detail. Abstracting the image simplifies the image into square blocks of color. This limits the visual palette to raise questions about color-as-category, and asks the viewer to judge the image only in terms of color. I limited the image resolution and color palette of Self-Portrait as a metaphor for the limited palette often used to identify individuals. For example, the limited palette of the person who reported me to the FBI acted to reduce the different parts of my appearance to match a profile defined by the cultural context of racial fears and terrorism.

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Perspective

As people experience the world around them, their perception is shaped by their context and worldview. When someone looks at another person, the first thing he/she may see is the individual’s physical appearance. This impression can be interpreted in a plethora of different ways, depending on who is doing the looking. The subjective perception of the viewer colors their interpretation. If an elderly person looks at me, they may see a young person, if a driver, a pedestrian, if a police officer, a criminal, etc. When I was reported to the FBI, the caller interpreted my appearance and actions within a social context that supported their fear of “Middle Eastern” people as terrorists. During this heightened period of time in US history, the caller didn’t see an artist, or even a tourist creatively shooting footage. They saw a threat. Following the plane crashes on September 11th, 2001, images of the hijackers were shown repeatedly on television news programs. The repetitious representation of their faces, framed by newsmakers in black and white equally cropped headshots, minimized differences and unified similarities, defined the visual profile of terrorism.

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Identity

Self-Portrait puts the viewer in the analytical seat of power, allowing them to define my identity from their perspective, to identify me through their worldview. The process of interpreting my portrait reveals more about the outside viewer’s identity than Self-Portrait necessarily reveals about mine. In the same way the FBI incident reveals more about the caller’s identity than it does about mine. Self-portraiture is an example of representing the self, the self-image, or some form of one’s identity, to be viewed by an audience outside of the self. I constructed, literally, a representation of my identity as trapped within the frame of a controlled grid structure to reference the imposed structure within which I am asked to define my identity. I view identity and identification as separate but related modes of being. Identity is a complex concept related to how a person perceives and identifies herself or himself. Identification, on the other hand, is a projection that marks or labels something or someone from an outside perspective. The act of identifying something or someone manifests the worldview of the person or group conducting the labeling. In the same way, the process of self-identifying and the process of identifying another person are both modes of identification that reveal an individual or group worldview or perspective.

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Skin Color

Having been considered “Hispanic,” “Middle Eastern,” and “White” at different times based on my appearance, I am fascinated by the fluidity of racial perception. Perceiving race is a complicated process of parsing, processing, synthesizing, and totalizing physical characteristics that signify a particular race in the United States. Despite the many factors used to categorize race, skin color has become a symbolic method for perceiving race. However, skin color varies within racial groups and across different categories to the point that skin color cannot accurately identify a person’s race. A person identified as Asian may have very similar skin color to that of a person identified as Caucasian, Latino, or Middle Eastern. Attempts to use skin color as a factor for determining a person’s race reveal inconsistencies in the fabric of race recognition and racial categories themselves.

Self-Portrait leaves my face in an unresolved state, allowing the viewer only to see abstracted sections of color. This draws attention to inconsistencies in the idea that a person has a single skin color. Human flesh ranges in tone from reddish to yellowish hues, with light and dark variations of each, running the gamut of combinations between. Moreover, skin color varies over any single person’s body, changes over time, from sun exposure, vitamin intake, scarring or other anomalies. In addition, light sources create highlights and shadows, which affect the look of the skin.

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Purity

One of the reasons I chose to use the Ralph Lauren color swatches was to question the idea of purity. “Naturals,” “Whitewash,” and “Thoroughbred” are some of the color categories prominently noted on the backs of the swatches. My initial interest was the category “Thoroughbred,” a term that references breeding and purity in horses or other animals. A purebred or thoroughbred animal is commercially more valuable than an animal of mixed stock. Historically, when ideas of racial purity have been pursued by institutions of power, it has devastated entire populations. Lifting racial purity to an ideal has led to the oppression and genocide of millions of people worldwide. The idea of purity connotes perfection, cleanliness, and superiority. Any modification to purity is considered imperfect, dirty, and inferior. As a person of mixed racial heritage, I identify with the oppression inherent in the idea of racial purity. I also can’t help seeing the irony of racial purity, considering purity is achieved through inbreeding.

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Consumer Culture

I also chose the Ralph Lauren brand to frame my identity as trapped and suspended within the framework of US consumer culture. Born in 1938 the son of Jewish immigrants, (Lauren’s original name was Lipshitz) Ralph Lauren went from the Bronx to owning a $10 billion dollar commercial empire. Ralph Lauren epitomizes the “American Dream.” The red, white, and blue Ralph Lauren logo forms the US flag but replaces the stars with the initials RL. Ralph Lauren Media LLC sells cultural sophistication in the form of magazines, restaurants, home decor, sports, travel, and fashion. People purchase these luxuries as status symbols of their social class, reflecting their own sense of identity through brand identity. The “American Dream” is a myth, US propaganda that says people can have a better, higher quality, higher standard of living in the United States. Defining life in the United States as better, elevated, or higher quality is built on consumer culture and the assumption that having lots of nice things is “better” than not having those things. This “higher standard” of living also demotes other countries and cultures as less sophisticated, a lower form on the cultural evolutionary chain.

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10 replies on “Self-Portrait”

Nathan:

I got to your site through acu.edu (I went to ACU, too).

I am interested in your self-portrait project, and would like to toy with doing one myself. My singular question right now is how you made the transfer from the “pixelated” image to selecting matching color swatches.

Okay… one more question. Is there a technique to mounting the chips between the layers of acrylic?

Thanks in advance… Todd

Thanks for writing, and good questions.

Transferring from the pixelated image to the actual paint swatches was tricky. Its all up to your eye. The funniest part is that the “value” ends up being more important to visual recognition, rather than the “color.” The dark or lightness of the swatch makes it work.

I did some tests and found that spray adhesive on the back of the swatch worked best. It’s delicate, because if you load it on too much, it fogs up the plexiglass. But if you don’t put on enough it falls off. I sprayed a light coat on the swatch, and after storing it for a year, several had fallen out of place. I had to open it up and re-glue some of them to display it a second time.

Would you mind if I posted your questions on the site?

Absolutely! Feel free to post my questions / your comments. I’m all for the open source mentality. In fact, I’m sure that if you put some guidelines / process up on your site, you could easily get traffic via make.com, et. al. If you are interested, I’d be glad to be a part.

I guess I wondered if there was a way to get a color value (CMYK, PMS, Lab, etc.) and input that information into the color matching computer at Home Depot. Might be an easy transfer if that information is available. There would also be the possibility of printing a 2″ x 2″ swatch of the read color and take it to Depot to do a “manual” match.

Well, I’ll get back to you if I have more thoughts. If I end up doing a similar project, I’ll let you know and send documentation.

This will give me something to ponder for a few days. (Sometimes the process of thinking through something is worth just as much as the finished product.)

While I think of it, your project reminded me of a site that outputs a (very) rasterized image from an uploaded photo. (example: I uploaded a picture of the Mona Lisa, and it sent back a PDF of the pictures as 77 4″x4″ pages. I then printed these labels on an industrial thermal label printer and assembled the image. I was quite pleased.) Lots of possibilities.

There is both an on-line version and a stand-alone version. Take your pick…

http://homokaasu.org/rasterbator/

Thanks for the conversation. All the best…

Todd

Hi Nathan,

I am a high school art teacher and am interested in doing the color swatch portrait project with my class right away! (Sorry for the urgency) I think it’s a great idea and will get my student’s thinking about a broad range of subjects related to identity.

I teach Photoshop so this would be a good way to incorporate Photoshop and collage in my classroom.

I went to Lowes and got a lot of paint swatches, but i have over 150 students! How many swatches (around) would I need for each student? Since the name of the color is printed on the front, i don’t need to put the work on clear acetate and was thinking of having my students enlarge the names of color?

I looked over the lesson plan and power point presentation but the you tube video is not posted anymore so I have a few questions about the process.

Once I have a pixelated printout of each student’s portrait, do they just use that as a reference and glue down the blocks of color onto anther sheet of paper? Is that it? do the printouts need to be in color? Is it possible for you to email me the video?

Hope you don’t find this email overwhelming. I look forward to hearing from you. Thank you!

Best,

Patricia

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