Saatchi Gallery Selfie Exhibiton

Over the summer, a few friends of mine had posted about going to the 'Selfie to Self Expression' Exhibition that had been running at the Saatchi Gallery in London. They'd fittingly posted selfies of themselves from the exhibition and some photos of the work on their Instagram accounts and I decided that I would like to see it too. I'm interested in meaningful work and I love visiting galleries, also I thought it may have some relevant work to inform my third year major project at university, as I want to address the theme of femininity/gender and self identity, among other ideas.

The work was varied from photography to sculpture and there was a lot of work to look through as well, which I thought was good. Upon entering the exhibition, there is a room full of phones and big screens flicking through self portraits by artists, including Frida Kahlo who was relevant to me as Kahlo's work challenges what it means to be feminine.

In another one of the rooms, hundreds of webcam style videos were being projected onto the wall in a grid, all of different people doing different things. I thought this was really interesting because you have to get really close to it to notice what all the people are doing and to notice all their different identities.

Another artist I found interesting was Juno Calypso and her piece 'Honeymoon Suite' (pictured below). I hadn't heard of her work before but it caught my eye as soon as I walked into the room. The shades of pink and vintage aesthetic of the photo spoke to me and, upon reading more, I realised that it was a self portrait where she was staging herself as a fictional character named 'Joyce' and had been taking photos of herself as artwork from a young age. I think it's really interesting when artists/photographers use themselves as models in their work because we usually regard 'selfies' as being superficial and vain but in the context of an artistic piece they suddenly become valuable and meaningful.

This piece in particular helped me to form the ideas for my zine 'Hard Times', where I used myself as a model but created a different identity to the one I display everyday.

All in all, this is just a short post to say that I found the Selfie to Self-Expression Exhibition at the Saatchi very useful and interesting and I will be using it as research for my major project.