Reflections From a Trick Mirror

Social media acts as a misleading portrait; one where we choose what to show, but more importantly, what to exclude. The pieces of ourselves that we cut and paste onto our profiles are always the most marketable parts of us. How easily we forget this when we are staring blankly into our phones wishing we had someone else’s life or someone else’s body. Everyone is lying. Through the curation of our online presence we become performative entities, completely dissociating the core of who we are. Whether mindfully or not, we are constantly comparing our lives and experiences to others when scrolling through Instagram. It is through this subconscious resentment that our outlook of the world is twisted, along with the understanding of our own worth. Social media is hypnotic; it consumes us as we consume content. 

This series addresses the distorted sense of self social media gives us by appropriating and altering imagery from celebrities’ and influencers’ Instagrams. The images are warped by dragging my phone on a scanner, following the light as if scrolling in slow motion. This creates a glitch effect, warping the subjects’ faces and pixelating their existence. The manipulation of these images mirrors the way social media skews our perception of reality while we lose ourselves in its algorithm.