For this project, I wanted to include all of the people I had recently met and become friends with, since moving to Charleston. Of this group, many were friends with each other already, some became friends through this project, and most of those that didn’t know each other directly, still had mutual friends that connected them.

What started as an excuse to create portraits of my friends, became an interesting venn diagram of the community and a fun excercise in discovering how our identities develop personally and communally.

I wanted this to be a collaborative experience, so everybody involved was encouraged to create/modify their own, or other’s portraits as well. I am a huge proponent of enabling and promoting creativity of every single person and this was definitive proof to me once again that as humans, making and experiencing art is as fundamental as it gets.

The first round of portraits were drawn by me, the second round of pieces were painted by some of the subjects, and the third round was another experiment of mine in combining and layering the multiple versions of a single portrait to create digital collages.