Tergel: Artist Statement for ReWorked Exhibition

I installed my first two person exhibition over the past weekend that doubled as my ReWorked assignment. For the exhibit, I needed to create an artist statement about my two works in the show. 

My first piece in the show is called "My Snapchat Story" which can be seen here. 

Snapchat Artist Statement:

Through Snapchat, sharing a snap of our lives has become easier than ever and with everyone sharing everything, our snapchat feeds are bombarded with banal cuts of everyday life that we quickly skip through, thirsty for an entertaining cut. But by disrupting the expectations within the medium, this film forces the viewer give up the control they have in deciding their content and experience social media as a viewer, not a user. 


My second piece was a collection of works that came out of my selfie book I made last year in advanced digital media. You can see the original book here. The PDF download is free! Because of the audience of the exhibit (high school age girls), the curator thought it unwise to display the book, but wanted me to create something with the images from the book. 

I was able to create a five piece display using my images from the book and creating some new sculptural pieces to create a fantastic show that I am pretty proud of. Below is the statement:

Selfie Misuse Artist Statement: 

Social media has made the world smaller, allowing us to share our feelings, knowledge and opinions with everyone. And how can we not? Sharing is a natural instinct in humans. When we share with others, we create a relationship of trust, which flows back and helps us feel secure and happy.

Today's sharing environment forces us to construct our identities through the contents that we post. But, when we identify with the content that we share, we give our audience the ultimate power over us. Because, anything that we share becomes tied to our identity. Everything we post on social media is an invitation to have our identities dissected, segmented, taken out of context and judged. Anything we share can be misused to misrepresent us.  "Selfie Misuse" takes our most personal identifying feature: our face. And it cuts, distorts and appropriates it into different contexts to warn viewers of the dangers of innocent sharing.