Glass Jar 2 (ongoing)
When shooting through a beautiful polished glass jar, you see an incredibly distorted world. This is an abstract body of work that depicts daily personal struggle. The inspiration behind the work is Picasso's painting Guernica, in which distorted forms are painted to stimulate the viewers' imagination and encourage the viewers to picture together the war scene. His work is implicative and mysterious, which I admire. To create the distorted and abstract human form, I shot through several different glass jars. I found glass jars quite symbolic. It projects rainbows under the sun, but when looking through it in the dark, without too much glare on its surface, you see through it a distorted world. It reminds me of the Wounded series I previously worked on, in which my focus is on the further marginalized LGBTQ community members within the already marginalized community, who live through a lot of pains under the superficial "rainbows".
Model: Ernesto Mendez