Ellania Nym (Diana Diaz Self-Portrait)

  

Ellania Nym

Self-Portrait

Diana Diaz

Colloquium in ACM

Prof. Caçoilo

Spring’ 19

  

I grew up playing roleplaying video games like mmorpgs (Massively multiplayer online role-playing game like Fly for Fun, World of Warcraft or League of Legends). I always thought of myself as one of these characters as a way to help me deal with my own insecurities and weaknesses. When playing an online role-playing, game depending on the game, there are usually several kinds of characters, you can choose from. They all have different traits and strengths. There’s the sorcerer (wizard), the druid (healer), the knight (short range tank/ warrior) and the paladin (long range skill/archer). I would always end up choosing the druid because it was the safest one since it can heal itself and others. But who I really always wanted to be was the knight, which is that character who has everyone’s back (or front in this case) and that would fight for anyone against anything.

The traits of a knight are: fearless, and even though I don’t consider myself as fearless because most of the times, I am too careful, I try my best to protect others. For my self-portrait, I decided to create a small bust of myself and add things to simulate armor, and other things that would help me look like those characters. The idea of the bust is an honor to a character that not only represents who I am but who I’d want to become. It also represents family bonding, since this project took a lot of effort from my whole family who helped me through the process. I loved the process, and I loved what it allowed me to realize. Some artists that inspired me to do a bust were Paige Bradley and Jeff Koons. Eventhough they are both very different in style, I believe they have a very unique way of externalizing how they feel about their art. Their work is a representation of their own personalities. They inspired me to want to learn more about the fine art side that I have as a graphic designer
that I refuse to lose.

Since this was a long and tedious process, we kept changing from different materials to some others.
The list is as follows:

- Molding Clay

- Foam Boards

- Compound (Wall)

- Plaster

- Rolled plaster

- Silicone Glue 

- Beads 

- Acrylic Spray Paint

- Primer Filler

- Primer

- Wood Filler

- Putty

- Fake Eyebrows

- Fake Eyelashes

- Fake Wig

- Wires for the ear’s shape

- Tape

- Nest

- and the list goes on...

I want to credit my parents, specially my dad for helping me through this whole process. He did not give up on me and on the whole project. Now I know I am such a perfectionist and extremist when it comes to trying to do the best I can because of him. I want to thank my sister also. And last but not least, Prof. Caçoilo for creating this project. I know it was intended for us to find in us something we cannot find by doing what we do in our everyday life, in our comfort zone.

"He adopted a role called Being a Father so that his children would have something mythical and infinitely important: A Protector. She did not stand alone, but what stood behind her, the most potent moral force in her life, was the love of her father"

 

IDENTITY THROUGH MEDIA CONSUMPTION

Introduction

Self-portraits are a unique way to self-reflect. I originally wanted to create portraits that involved my family and important changes through my childhood. However, since we discussed that one’s identity isn’t only about one’s heritage, place of birth, or neighborhood, I decided take a different approach and show my identity though the media that I consumed through my childhood until now.

Childhood Self-Portrait

The first self-portrait shows an 8-year-old me surrounded by in all kinds of forms. My taste in music was mainly influenced by my fathers love of classic rock. Mind you, this was a time before there was such thing as Pandora Radio or Spotify, so we would tune into Q 104.3 and jam out to all the legends such as ACDC, Led Zeppelin, and Pink Floyd.

At that time, I also had a Sega Genesis that my father bought right after we moved into a new apartment in North Newark. I had four games, but the most memorable games where Mighty Power Rangers and Sonic the Hedgehog.

A couple of years later, my father got his hands on a PlayStation 1 with a missing centerpiece that allowed the CD to spin. He quickly replaced it from one of his Walkman CD players and fixed the PlayStation. I mainly had racing games, but none could compare to the Dukes of Hazzard video game.

Along with the racing games, movies such as The Fast and the Furious fulfilled my passion for cars even more. The first of the franchise introduced me to the iconic Japanese sport cars and the tuner culture with cars such as the Toyota Supra, Mitsubishi Eclipse, and the Honda S2000.

Recent Self-Portrait

My second self-portrait shows me a little less than a year ago surrounded by more current media that I consume. I choose to stick with the same forms of media as my childhood self-portrait (music, TV shows, video games) to compare them side by side.

My more recent self-portrait shows how technology has advanced over time. Ditching things like the radio for streaming services such as Spotify. My taste in music has changed over the years as I started to discover old-school hip-hop artists, such as Notorious B.I.G, Wu-Tang clan, and more modern ones such as Travis Scott and Kanye West.

As for video games, the Sega Genesis made its way up to the attic and the PlayStation 1 was thrown out after my father found out that the PlayStation 2 was backwards compatible, meaning that it could play all of my original PlayStation 1 games. At this time, I got my hands on more violent video games such as Grand Theft Auto and Call of Duty. At first my parents where regretting letting me play these games. They worried that the violence depicted on the screen would do me harm, but I convinced them that I had a strong morality and was mature enough to play.

As I got older my parents got looser on me. I would spend Saturday nights watching Adult Swim over at a friend’s house. This introduced me to adult animated shows such as Family Guy, South Park, Robot Chicken, and most recently Rick and Morty. 

Future Self Portrait

This self-portrait is intended to show my predicted media consumption after graduating college. Using the three consistent forms of media, I’ve shown how my future responsibilities may prioritize my media consumption to other things.

New logos such as Google Chrome (the internet), Pinterest, Awwwards, Adobe Creative Cloud represent my key tools in my future professional career as a graphic designer. The MB Design logo shows my future plans to open my own design firm in the tri-state area.

Other logos such as Zillow, Robinhood, and YouTube represent other forms of incomes. Whether its investing in stocks through Robinhood, investing in real estate through Zillow, or building a YouTube channel, I will always make sure that I’m financially stable, one way or another.

Things such as my passion for cars like the Mazda RX7 and Porsche 911 (993), or my love with classic rock and video games are one of the many things that will stick around no matter how old I’ll get.           

Connections to Course topics

Throughout the course, we’ve discussed how our identity isn’t only shaped by where we come from, or what we physically look like. Identity can also be shown through the media that we consume. When we discussed about how sesame streets educational standards became more dynamic and not just be limited to teaching kids math and letters, I would watch other PBS programs such as Arthur, Caillou and Cyberchase that would go beyond teaching me numbers and the alphabet.

In my older more recent self-portrait, it shows how technology has modernized where I can choose what ever media I want at any given time. With the invention of the smartphone, the newer generations seems to be sucked into some kind of mind control because social media platforms such as Instagram and Twitter, as well as streaming apps such as youtube and spotify, give them the ability to consume all the media they could ask for on demand.

bitch. A Self Portrait Project.

Artist Statement: 

     Our discussions in class regarding the construction of an identity were the class sessions that I enjoyed the most. I was learning so much about all the different things people do to their identity whether they shape it, constrain it, mask it, etc, especially my own person. Aside from enjoying Erik Erikson’s reading simply because we share the same phonetic spelling of our names, I was able to resonate with myself as well as learn more about how I portray my identity as well as how I built that portrayal. The first thing that comes to mind when I hear portrait is a painting, so I thought to myself that I was going to have to paint for this project. Then, I heard the words self-portrait and I figured that I was going to have to paint a picture of myself. And so, I decided to paint my thoughts the best way I know how to paint, through video. 

     Coming up with the idea for my self-portrait video, titled ‘bitch.’,was far from conventional. My original plans were to create some sort of narrative that I felt best fit me but it did not end up that way. What I will usually do when making some kind of story for a video is I will record myself and speak my thoughts out loud on camera, and then I will review the footage later and try and bounce any ideas that come to mind while watching myself and form a narrative through those steps. While reviewing my footage I noticed how raw and uncut my thoughts looked and sounded on tape, and this led me to the realization that I was doing things all wrong. I was trying my hardest to make a story that I wanted my identity to fit into and take mold after but in reality, all the thoughts in my head that I was repeating to the camera was really how I saw myself and my identity as it truly is. 

     Making the video was a very weird yet eye opening experience for me. I mean this in the sense that my feelings have never been provoked as much as they were while editing this. My style of editing videos usually involves using quick, timely, and comedic cuts and transitions and that was exactly how I followed through with the video. This time however, I interpreted my video as a dramatic one rather than a comedic one. I relate it a lot to the structure of a play. My character is going through the crisis seeing my own view of masculinity as a challenged and misconstrued one. Although I am portraying myself as the protagonist, my troubled thoughts play as an antagonist. The quick cuts which bombard a viewer represent just how much in disarray my thoughts are about myself and my identity. Along with that, I manipulated my footage so it shows how my uneasy articulation of simple sentences are plaguing me as well as my psyche. 

Latinas and Split-Identity

My name is Noemi Mangual-Rosa. I was born in Aguadilla, Puerto Rico and moved to the United States when I was 1.5 years old. As I've grown up, I got a lot of criticism from my family in Puerto Rico about how "gringa" I am living in Brooklyn and in Newark (which are not typical places where you find gringas anyway. Because I look a little ethnically ambiguous, I've always gotten the "where are you from" question all the time; especially when I speak. I've always been criticized for sounding "too white" to be from Newark/New York/Puerto Rico. Because of this, I struggled with assimilation; as many Latinas do. A popular Spanish phrase says "ni de aquí, ni de allá", which perfectly describes the story of thousands of Latinx who never quite fit in here or there. Identity is a particularly tough concept for Latino/as to grapple with, particularly first-generation Latinas who often find themselves split between two mindsets. I love hotdogs and hamburgers as much as I love tembleque and chuletas. My portrait represents how I am one individual under a split identity living as an American in the United States but still yearning to fit into my cultural identity back home. Additionally, being an Afro-Latina and not outwardly looking the part has also caused some further loss of identity that I had to take upon myself to learn and embrace. Through using tools such as Ancestry DNA to further identify who I am, I learned that I am 36% black, which means that my African roots hold a big part of my heritage.I stopped straightening my hair and started to understand that I am the intersection of being black and Latina and how to be unapologetic about my heritage and what it means to me. Being Afro-Latina means not having to choose; they do and should coexist.