Ella Lehavi Art 141 Final
Quaranscreens
Isolation, derealization, and stress in the digital and pandemic age
Warped Reality
It can be hard to distinguish between what is in front of and behind the screen when your entire life is moved online. With this new reality, life becomes more overwhelming and your conceptualization of human existence and interaction warps.
Speculation
When you only interact with people through screens, the types of people and media you interact with blur together. Your conception of what is and isn't real changes, and sometimes you yourself feel more like a witness to your own life than the person living it. I wanted to add a bit of a funny spin on this concept in this piece and did so by editing in the two anime characters (Bruno Bucciarati from Jojo's Bizarre Adventure and Olivier Armstrong from Fullmetal Alchemist Brotherhood).
Perception
How has the way we interact with ourselves and others changed?
Self Image
How do we see ourselves when we barely see others? And with that, how do we see the tasks and world that sustain us? The reflection in the mirror is real. However, the rest of the piece is all drawn, showing how these small things begin to pile up and feel constructed. With quarantine warping our daily lives and perceptions of ourselves, we often end up questioning how much of what we do is necessary and taking note of the more arbitrary things and how they eventually overwhelm us. How do we cope and find balance when our "normal" reality is so easily shifted?
Social Image
How does the way we interact with others affect our perceptions of socialization and feelings of isolation? With increased social media usage, socialization feels less and less like real interaction and more tedious and task-like. Because of the inability to socialize in person, we end up going to talk to friends in the same places and ways we do our schoolwork and jobs, narrowing the divide between those two worlds and leading to the activities that should be enjoyable simply becoming another item on the checklist.
Inspiration and process
"quaranscreen"
As a freshman experiencing their first year in college online, I often feel as if I'm losing touch with the world around me. Stuck between my home life and the college community that exists for me only online, it feels as if my sense of reality has blurred as I experience this crucial transition only through pixels. As I transition into adult life and learn how to take care of myself while also balancing the workload of college with little social gratification, I often feel overwhelmed, isolated, and unreal. Additionally, growing up in the digital age and living in a pandemic in which my world is entirely online has completely warped the way I interact with people and the world, begging the question of who, where, and what is real if I only see it on a screen.
Process
I made my pieces using a mix of Photoshop and Clipstudio Paint Ex. I enjoy drawing/illustration and wanted to incorporate that somehow into my final pieces, deciding to use it alongside compositing and editing images in photoshop to give my pieces a more uncanny and less real feeling. Drawing is a reflection of a perception of reality, which fits well with the theme of warped reality during the pandemic. I also played around with different "lenses," using a screen, window, and mirror in my pieces to reflect the boundary between real and drawn and show how perception of reality can often be misleading or overwhelming. I worked with the motif of clutter as well, often including lots of images or objects and flashy patterns to further add confusion to my pieces.