Families are strange, and I’m interested in why we try to pretend like they’re not. There is a familiarity we seek and feel with commonplace portraiture, and I investigate methods of making these familiar images seem oddly unfamiliar.

Portraits generally display a desired, quintessential image of a person. It is often, however, that the image depicted is a façade for the myriad of personalities that make up the subject of the portrait. I’m interested in the complexities of people, and how their various identities are lost upon the capturing of a portrait and the image that remains.

The multiple layering and duplication of each subject is inspired by the proliferation of the phenomena in which so many of us, like a society of clones, succumb to the standard of presenting ourselves to the world in a portrait in which a smiling face masks the true identities of the person within.

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2-D by JessicaW1