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Frances Raboen (1971)
http://www.francesraboen.com
Frances Raboen’s art often has to do with social identity. She’s especially fascinated by how the self, the unconscious mind, guides our behavior. To expose that phenomenon, to bring it to our attention, she creates both two- and three-dimensional works in a variety of media.
WORK
Selfiesh, photography & digital print, 2014
Selfiesh is a selfie similar to many of those that appear as profile photos in various social media. Such portraits are often far from the truth—a social identity you’ve created for yourself and have to maintain, or . . . taken at a moment when in fact you should have been focused on what was going on around you and not on yourself.
Ultimately, however, the portrait disintegrates (the heads in the original work, therefore, are painted on transparencies with liquid watercolor, which eventually vanishes), and nothing remains but the naked truth and you’re forced to look yourself in the eye. What then? Are you still so fine? And what do you see when you look beyond yourself at the rest of the world?