"They're like self-portraits that we didn't get to draw"

The most recent project for the 11th-grade class that I'm student-teaching was, in my mind, a really interesting group exercise, both in terms of the physical works it produced and in terms of the issues of representation it raised with the students.

The project was both simple and complex:  each student posed for a headshot photo, which was then printed and cut into six equal squares (the 11th Grade art class has two sections of 6 students each).  The squares were shuffled and handed out to all six students in each section - so that each student had a chance of there being some fragments of his or her own face, but a much bigger chance of fragments of others' faces.  Each of the squares was to be reproduced on much larger (around 18x18) pieces of paper (using any black-and-white material - charcoal, pencil, ink, etc).

When all of the individual drawings were completed, they would be correlated, arranged and taped together so that the original photos would have been reproduced by up to six different artists. 

Here are some of the results:

 

(I absolutely love the one on the right, for what it's worth - the eyes are a remarkable combination)

The students loved making the drawings, and their exploration of materials and imagery was a lot of fun to watch and encourage.  They were very supportive of each other while working - talking up each other's skill and in general sounding like they really loved the assignment.

Then it came time to put the images together.

At that point, several of the students (all of them girls) voiced frustration with "how I look."  They weren't complaining about the individual drawings, or even pointing out the fairly obvious points in the assembled portraits in which one student's rendering was less exact than another's.  To do so, after all, would break up the bonhamie they'd been enjoying for the last two weeks of studio time.  Instead, they just complained about the whole "assembled" drawing.  Strangely, they would say what they thought the drawing looked like other than them ("I look like a devilspawn," "I look like some kind of alien dog or something"), but they never said "this doesn't look like me."

One of the students explained to me "this is rough, especially for, you know, teenage girls, who are all self-conscious about everything in the first place.  It's like a self-portrait that we didn't get to draw."

That last sentence is key:  these drawings feel, due to their roughness, their basic materials, their scale, like the sort of identity statement that a high-school student would make in a piece of art.  The identity, however, is removed from the hand of the artist(s).

It's a fine example of the tension that can result when someone recognizes that they aren't in control of their own representation.