Mirage

Humans go through life without ever truly seeing themselves. Their image is reflected through the perspective of photographs, paintings, and mirrors People spend more time looking at others than at their selves. This causes them to form a set of ideas on what it means to be human based on their perspective of others. Mirage is about reflection on oneself and the distorted ways we view our bodies. My primary inspiration is drawn from the optics and fragmentation of a broken mirror. In a sense, every mirror we look into is broken, since people have a false perception of who they are or should look like based on the barrage of messages they receive through the media, internet, and innumerable other sources. People are led to believe that perfection is the ultimate form of beauty when actually it is the imperfections that define the beauty of an individual. Lacan’s theory of the mirror stage, in addition to the visual works by Pablo Picasso, inspired Mirage which expresses the concept that our perception of the physical body is distorted through external lenses such as the media and fashion industry.