Final Piece + Rationale

“Exposed”

I want to re-define the way people think about exposure to the sun.

This series takes a critical position on the contemporary concern of humankind’s relationship to the environment and brings attention to the fact that light (UV) causes skin cancer. Humankind effected the environment by causing the ozone hole and now the environment is effecting humans back by giving them skin cancer due to more ultra violet rays being let in through the ozone hole.

These are pictures of bodies, but by de-contextualising them and photographing only parts of them, they can start to take on new meaning. I selected images that reflected the idea of cancer and cells and then projected them onto these bodies to convey ideas about how light can effect our skin. The way the light hits the skin starts to form correlations with how the light hits the surface of earth. By physically projecting onto bodies, the subject matter looks much more tangible and evokes stronger feelings in the viewer.

By presenting this work in the style of a specimen poster, it forces the viewer to look from image to image and examine the differences and similarities in each while re-evaluating their own position on the topic. The photographs have been cropped into circles to reflect the key ideas of the sun and the earth; the ozone hole and moles, sunspots, and cancerous cells.

These images are deliberately simplistic and quite ambiguous to provoke thought and allow viewers to draw their own conclusions.