Be Yourself?

     For my Xerox project, I wanted to do something different and try to integrate myself into my concept. What I did for the project was xerox a ton of my hands and along with that, many different facial expressions. The idea was to have all of the hands as if they were clawing at me along with a mask full of expressions. With the xeroxed body parts, I'm holding up a sign that says be yourself.

     At first looking at this, the message may be a little strange of what I'm trying to convey but I wanted to explain the difficulties of staying true to yourself. The hands reaching towards the body are different people that come into our lives that try to steer us into different directions which is what the facial expressions are for. Those expressions symbolize the people we turn into. We always say to be ourselves but it is very hard to do that when we have peer pressure of trying to fit into groups or joining cliques. Throughout high school, I myself have changed to fit into "popular" cliques or try to hang out with others that I really wasn't similar too. It's an uncomfortable feeling hiding who you are which is why the only part of my body that isn't covered is holding the sign. I intentionally did that to show the pureness of who we really are. It's who we are underneath the fake personas.

     Overall, I'm pretty happy with how this came out. It was an interesting idea that I had and was glad to bring it to life! The only thing that could've went better was xeroxing the face but I was able to work with what I had!