Self Portrait Option 4

http://www.personal.psu.edu/kmh5091/Self%20Portrait%204.JPG

"Lounging in the City"

This was a fun assignment that I enjoyed thoroughly. I chose to represent my self as a golden lab for a couple of reasons. First off, my family owns a golden lab that we love and admire very much, she is a huge part of our family. Secondly, I am extremely jealous of our dog, all her daily life consists of is sleeping and eating. I mean, who wouldn't want to be a dog, really. I'd definitely trade in my life of working hard to maintain school and relationships and the ongoing job of making money for a life of lounging around on the couch as a family dog only having to worry about when you're going to eat next. It's not that I don't enjoy my life as a human, but being a household dog would definitely be ideal. You may be wondering just why I chose to keep my human arms. Well, I thought about it, and I would still want to do a lot of the things I do as a human if I were to be a dog. Most of all, I wouldn't want to lose my ability to play the guitar, I love playing music and I would never want to lose that. Another thing to notice in the photo is my new habitat, New York City. I've always wanted to live in that city, and hope to after graduation. I have dreams of going to baseball games and Broadway shows and other various activities on the streets of New York City in some point of my life. My thought process was, "If I was creating my ideal life as a household dog, I might as well live in my dream location, the city".

I tried to use realism as much as I could in this project. I used all real pictures of myself. Three different ones for my face and two arms. I also used a real picture of a yellow lab and obviously a real picture of New York City. These three objects are obviously real separately but a hybrid dog-human is nothing close to reality. It was helpful to think of Frida Kahlo's Wounded Deer while doing this project, and I even tried to match the pose of that deer in the image to the pose of myself in my new habitat. I feel much like Frida Kahlo's work represented how she felt she was being treated at the time, my work represents how I feel about my life. All the pressure of being a human being in college are so intense, that I feel life as a golden lab would be my ideal life, life as a dog lounging around in the greatest city on the planet would most definitely be magical.