Dissonance: My artwork changing in style

As of late, I have started to change my ideas of how to express my issues with my own identity. With some help from Tom though, I got the ball rolling again. I started searching for ways to express my conflict and internal issues in more ways that could still be drawn back to the same ideas of before, with the same concept, but have a totally different face and image makeup. I started thinking of how I could express a separation, an actual view of ‘two of me’ within a piece without starting to become heavily dependant on Adobe Photoshop, and the post-production of my imagery. I thought back to images of past, where I was in a reflection of a glass pane of sorts, but was not pictured in the actual image. My concept of ‘the struggle’, which has been a running theme throughout all of my work here at VCU, stemmed first from these images, and still feel as if they are some of the strongest pieces I have done. Here are a few examples below.

These pieces got me to think of how I could incorporate myself within an image, and be pictured twice in an image, without questions being asked of where the other ‘me’ came from. I then thought how I could change this shot to resemble the state of myself being separated or being dissonant from one me to the other, as if each one of me, the reflection, and the actual, each stood one representing the Kenyan side, and the other representing the American side. The dissonance and separation between the two of me in the image needed to be pictured realistically, but also needed to clearly show a confusion or separation. I finally thought of the idea of me flipping the reflection of me in one of the images from being a picture that makes sense, to one in which the reflection is opposite of what it is supposed to be. For example, the following image correctly shows the reflection of me in a photograph. Now, imagine if I decided to flip the reflection so that I would face the camera, instead of the reflection showing my back, as it so properly should. I would do this by layering another photograph of extreme similarity of me with the opposite reflection in the window, therefore creating an image that shows disconnect between the two of me in the image. I know that this involves a decent amount of Photoshop, however, I feel as if I am not creating a new ‘me’ in the image, I am just taking another photograph of extreme similarity and layering it on top.