The Mask We Wear

Client

Personal Project

role

CG Generalist

Collaborator(S)

Kristoff Fink

year

2021

In the poem,”We Wear the Mask”, by Paul Laurence Dunbar, the mask is a metaphor for human duplicity and concealment. There is a suggestion that the mask’s role in human life is inevitable. The mask must be worn both to engage in duplicity and to protect the interior self from the untrustworthy eyes of the rest of the world.

DESCRIPTION

Influenced by the racially-charged and disturbingly narrative silhouettes in the work of Kara Walker, a collection of individual alphas were used to inform three-dimensional transformations in the development of the mask. This transformation is akin to the way we stretch a smile across our face to restrain inner traumas, conflict, and bubbling pain. Behind the curled open lips and the dimples of hollowed cheekbones, a clenched smile of repression creeps into view. This smile, much like the mask, serves as a means of censorship, where the succession of teeth present as cell bars constraining the volatile truths deemed unsavory by societal standards.

Just as the artificial mask stands as a hardened fortress wall, resolute to the influences and lashes of an unforgiving world, so does the facade of this clenched smile. However, no fortress, whether of concrete or emotion, is perpetually impenetrable and absolute. In both cases, the moment arrives when the defenses weaken, and the cracks begin to form. As the grin comes across the face, you begin to see the mask tear open, the bars come free, and the fiery expression of individual identity is released.

This tear symbolizes freedom, but not without its violent series of consequences. It is a rupture that mirrors the influences that shaped the mask, ultimately leading to a cathartic release of the dark matter that lies behind the walls, much like the disturbing narratives that inspired this transformation.