Unknown Artist

Unknown Artist is an ongoing multifaceted series of works in video art, photography, installation, and social media examining depictions of fictional visual artist characters in film and television. Since 2019, I have researched and archived over 216 feature films and 275 episodes of television spanning decades of fictionalized representations of the artist in entertainment media. Collectively, they reveal how artists are characterized and mythologized; how these representations inform a cultural and overly romanticized understanding of who the artist is while mirroring a dominant fantasy of the artist as white, male, obsessed, and suffering. Delving into the clichéd stereotypes and re-historicization, I am working on a multifaceted series of works under this rubric. Each work takes a unique formal approach to the material and functions as its own thematic volume within the larger series titled Unknown Artist.
NotAMuse (Unknown Artist, vol. 2) 2020-2022.

Unknown Artist - photo installation
film stills on archival pigment paper
dimension variable (this view 96” x 156”)

Currently this image archive contains 857 images of films and television programs ranging from 1914 to 2022. The images are a combination of film stills of artist characters, reoccurring thematic visual tropes (for example: artists breaking stuff or death scenes), and the artwork these characters theoretically create.

unknown.artist.archive
ongoing social media project

The unknown.artist.archive is an ongoing social media project, delivered in short chapters, exploring material from my research. Each scene, when isolated, highlights familiar yet absurd ways fictional visual artist characters are constructed in film and television.
https://www.tiktok.com/@unknown.artist.archive?
https://www.instagram.com/unknown.artist.archive/