Feeling Into - Part 2: Portraits of Other Perspectives
Feeling Into, used shoes and spray paint, 2018.
My intention while developing the second part of this project, the portraits of other perspectives, was to convey a sincere attempt to empathize. I did this by collecting used shoes from family members, friends, and acquaintances. The intimacy of asking people for their shoes and explaining to them why I needed them had a kind of wholesome bonding effect on me and on those relationships that I did not expect. This collection of shoes represents the variety of perspectives in my life which I struggle to comprehend as my restricted view of other perspectives is both what drives and cripples my need to make connects. To express the limited way that I can understand other people’s perspectives, the shoes are all painted a neutral beige. Although they are real shoes, representing real people, they are also empty, serving as merely a symbol for an absent person. Details about the real person who wore those shoes are surely present, but they are obscured by the paint and lost in translation.