Two-Face: Reflections, Process, Documentation

My second project had its fair share of ups and downs. One of the aspects of the project I had to get rid of entirely is the head bust covered in a Phototex print. I think this would have been a very cool way to present the project and better embody the character of Two-Face from the Batman comics. Shipping eventually led to the decision to do something else since both products were being shipped in outside of the US! The head bust came in well before the project, and I wouldn’t have known it had come in if my roommate didn’t mention it. With the Phototex, I cancelled the order because the delivery date would have been well-past my presentation date.

Despite these obstacles, I believe my project came out pretty well! Going into this, i didn’t have an idea of what sort of images I wanted to use for the project. I knew I wanted to do a circular shape, representing the coin Harvey Dent flipped in the comics, with one side showing “good” images and the other showing “bad.” However, thinking about framing and which images to use led me into a sort of writer’s block. Once I went to The Refinery in the 19th Ward, an abandoned warehouse-turned-artist’s space, I got the inspiration to take pictures of everything. The idea behind this would be to capture pictures that I noticed and would not have noticed if I didn’t take a picture of it.

Ultimately, the idea of the photos became a contrast between the beauty we notice versus the beauty we don’t. A lot of the images are subjective, especially since I took pictures of everything I noticed and a lot of pictures that I didn’t. I ended up with a massive collection of photos to sift through, and I settled on some images that people might overlook without careful examination (like the ashtray, the open circuit box, etc.). By showing this contrast of mundae images, I wanted to evoke one of the major themes of one of my favorite books, Joseph Conrad’s Heart of Darkness. In the book, Conrad explores the part of a person’s personality that we construct for ourselves versus the personality that we construct for other people. In a way, the former is our real “face” while the latter is our “mask.” With the pressures of society in today’s society (especially via social media), we often forget to cultivate our real “face” in favor of our “mask.” We don’t notice who we truly are because we tend to focus on how we present ourselves to other people.

Framing the images was another creative choice that I struggled with, but the answer was so obvious! As I mentioned in a previous blog post, comics are another form of art, bound by frames individual frames that evoke different responses. For both sides of the coin, I decided to settle on framing the images as if they were pages out of a comic book. On the “good” side - the side we are active in thinking about when around others - I included scanned images from Dark Knights Metal that included the Justice League (Batman, Superman, Wonder Woman, et al). Then, I included other images that were considered to be beautiful by the average person. Since the idea of “beauty” alludes to a shared reaction to something pleasing, I included pictures that evoked this response. Also, most of the images were taken from the outside, again alluding to the externality of these subjects/images.

For the other side, or the “bad” side, I took images that are placed in an interior location. While the idea of beauty is inherently subjective, the images I chose would be considered, by the average person, to be either dull or even “ugly.” On this side, I also included a scan of the Batman who Laughs, a version of Batman that, in an alternate universe, kills the Joker and becomes evil. Seeing how Batman is capable of falling victim to his darker side, I was reminded of Harvey Dent in Christopher Nolan’s The Dark Knight. As the Joker might say, “All it takes is one really bad day.”

For the final part of my installation, I began running into the problems mentioned earlier. While the head-bust came in, I didn’t know how to utilize it, given the space. While I did end up studying the space I wanted to use, I wasn’t sure about how I could incorporate the idea of “duality” and “subjectivity” since there were at least 5 different surfaces to consider for the middle part of the wall. I really loved the lighting, so I was set on using this particular space. Ultimately, I had to improvise by creating images that evoked the conflict of the exterior vs the interior. With the head bust, I bought a black mask (to match the color of the black bust) that I placed over the bust, facing in the same direction of the “good” images. I also placed another image above the head with a bloody smiley face (which was an image of the same microfiber cloth that I used for the first project). To mirror the opposite side, I had an image of a shot glass that I had in the shape of a skull (since skulls are, you know, inside the head). On the bust, I had the actual face facing the “bad” side of the coin. One decision I made was to have a bandaged “X” over one of the eyes. Since I wanted to allude to the idea of the parts of life that we are not completely aware of, I bandaged over the eye in order to allude to a certain “blindness” that we have to the darker sides of ourselves. While we are aware of these sides existing, we haven’t completely embraced this side in favor of our social masks.

Again, this was both a fun and challenging project that made me recall many different texts from books, films, and comic books. I gave the images a “comic book” aesthetic in order to evoke this look, and I think I am more satisfied with what I did with the bust than I originally anticipated with the Phototex! While I probably could have used any regular wall with a flat edge, it was ultimately the lighting that made me stick with my original decision. Overall, I really enjoyed thinking about this project, especially when thinking about myself as both a rational and emotional human being.