Peter-Alexander Eccles
In my junior year, I first began to work with video as an artistic medium with the idea of yearning for and romanticizing the past as my central conceptual focus. Most if not all of my pieces analyzed either the nature of nostalgia as a function of the human condition or its counterpart- the impact that our false recollections of the past have on our present day happiness and desire to replicate past memories (past love and purity of childhood). During this time, I witnessed a unique artistic phenomenon exclusive to the nature of my medium as my message and self-expression began to reach relatively large masses in my school through social media outlets, which empowered my formally introverted self. This year, I decided to dig deeper into this central theme by including myself in my artwork, examining my newfound self-absorption under this lens and preoccupation with recreating the feeling of being in last year’s spotlight. On a large scale, my artwork represents the nature of the Internet as a corruptive force, nurturing the self-importance and the attention-seeking obsession that's prominent in our generation.