PORTRAIT OF THE ARTIST FROM AGES 16-21
Designer - Blair Simmons
Year - 2022
Materials - Laptop, cement, water, rocks, dirt
This piece is from my series Archive of Digital Portraits Cast in Concrete. The series has emerged out of my current pedagogy and research-driven practice, where I have been exploring themes of technology, queerness, anxiety, pain, and labor. This show is both informed and bound by my severe anxiety disorder, chronic pain, and migraines. While working, I often need to move both quickly and carefully, in a race against time before my body shuts down. My research process is often overly laborious: collecting soft and hard data; reading and researching; teaching and discussing; making and endlessly iterating. The physical process of making these works mimics the daily pain of work and labor—warping, distorting, grinding, and wearing down. This series of pieces is both critical of and dependent on technology, mirroring the ways technology can be a solution to my chronic pain and the source of the pain itself.