m. opetaia-williamson

my work
see what we don't see
who are we anyway?
minds insideout
pay for it.
weight of expectations

Title: it's that tribe
Date: 10/2005

With this project I thought about all the different possibilities of combining people’s faces and what they could mean. I went back to culture once again and thought about how people, including myself, don’t really recognize the significant differences between one tribal group and another or what so importantly makes them who they are. So I took a Native American from a tribe that lived along a river in the northern United States and I morphed his face, clothing, and decorations with a man from an African tribe. In the end, just looking at the result, one wouldn’t know that this made-up person doesn’t really belong to anywhere at all. This was important to my concept because I wanted people to see how much we really don’t know about other people and how unimportant we can make a person’s most prided qualities by not even realizing the importance they have to a certain culture.

Title: possibilities
Date: 10/2005

In this black and white image I decided to morph myself with a man from an African tribe. I have this idea that I think about a lot where any one of us could be someone else, but ourselves at the same time, had just one thing changed along the way. If one parent had married someone else and the other parent married someone else, we could have possibly existed as two other people, not quite like ourselves, but maybe not all that different either. Or I think about my grandfather’s stories from World War II and how his best friend got blown to pieces right beside him and how that could’ve been him had he been on the right and his friend been on the left. Or how they could’ve killed him any of the three times he escaped while he was a POW in Germany. Then my father would have never been born and my mother would have married someone else and maybe a different version of me would exist in a totally different life with half of my genes being completely different. I thought about this idea of chance and fragileness and how we never know what’s going to happen and how we can’t change what has already happened and how at every moment something happens to set our life course in one direction instead of a zillion others. So in mixing myself with someone else I was playing with this idea of how fragile history really is and yet how we are so strongly created by it.

home
about
contact
links