 | Inyoung Seo: Looking at the Lord Coming BackTheta Belcher Gallery, 02/22/2022–02/24/2022Advisors: Shaun O'Dell, Erik Friedman | ||
Artist's Statement
The form and subject of my work is large scale realistic figurative works with a surreal landscape background. The subject of my work for my final BFA exhibition is a self-portrait of myself as a bride waiting for the bridegroom, Jesus, as a metaphor used in the Bible to describe my relationship with God as a Christian. My drawing is a self-portrait of myself wearing a wedding dress with a surreal landscape in the background. My work is in the form of a life-size realistic drawing done in pastels on 5 feet by 8 feet paper.
I chose to work with pastels on paper because I like feeling the texture of paper when I am rubbing pastels with my fingers. Also, because the paper I used is lightweight, it is easy to make it hang on the wall. The reason I want to create a life-sized realistic portrait is that I am interested in bringing and enhancing the presence of people I draw on paper. As a Christian, I believe that people are created in the image of God. I seek to see and feel the presence of God in my everyday life, and the act of drawing people is one way for me to do so. I believe that I can see a fragment or glimpse of God in people. For this particular work, I want to project the image of who I want to be as a Christian in a metaphorical sense. I have identity crisis, and I constantly inquire about my identity. By making a self-portrait, I want to inquire about my identity in this world as a Christian. I want to put a surreal landscape as the background to convey the otherworldliness because in the Bible, one can come across the idea that Christians do not belong to this world because the Christ is not of this world. Another reason that I incorporate a surreal background is that I am interested in making the scene look like it is from a fairy tale because scenes from fairy tales have this feeling that they do not exist in the real world. I am interested in the world of unconsciousness and the way fairy tales function as the reflection of one's unconsciousness and dreams. I want my drawings to have a dream-like and mysterious quality.