Hides
Role
Personal project
Medium
acrylic on paper
Size
lifesize
This is my thesis, my final project for my MFA in Illustration from SVA.
Hides is a series of five life-size acrylic paintings on paper, each cut to the silhouette of its figure and shown together as a suite. Painted in fluorescent color with bold, mosaic-like brushwork. With gold and copper horns catching the light against neutral skin. The figures meet you at eye level. They are life-size for a reason. You are not looking at them. You are standing among them.
The horns weren’t given. They were chosen.
I love a good pun, so this series is called Hides, meaning to hide, and also hide, as in skin. Each figure is huddled inside a sort of beast costume, brightly colored, dinosaur-adjacent.
It's armor, but playful armor. Not the kind that keeps people out so much as the kind we build to get through the day.
That's really what this series is about for me: the quiet ways we armor ourselves. Humor when we're not okay. Smiling anyway. Showing up, even in a costume, even when it's hard.
There is a kind of armor that looks like joy. That is round and soft and bright. That you put on in the morning not to fight, but to survive. To be looked at without being seen.
And then there is the body underneath. The postures say what their outer skins don’t. Slightly too much. Slightly wrong.
The horns weren’t given, they were chosen.
