Felicia Hertada
Beauty Inside
Class of: 2027
Major: Design and Technology BFA
Medium: Mask and Photography
Faculty: Bryan Melilo and Leia Carter
Prompt: For this bridge project you will get to know another person in the class through a series of interactions and interviews (seminar). Through these experiences you gained understanding and insight into their attributes and personality traits. Using this information, develop a mask that will liberate, heal, transform and empower them beyond their fears, insecurities and inhibitions. The mask you make is not specifically for your partner, it is a mask designed to dissolve whatever the issue is that they shared they would like to overcome, heal, or transform. That "issue" is universal. Meaning that all humans carry some version of it. For example, if your partner is afraid of failure then you make a mask designed to help them over come the fear of failure. All humans struggle with failure. Some people get paralyzed by it. Meaning they can not move because they are so afraid of failure, therefore they won't learn anything new or have a huge challenge in starting something unknown to them. That is one extreme example of the fear of failure. A less extreme example is how some people don't like failure but it does not bother them so much, in fact, they use the fear because it gives them a rush of energy which they apply towards beginning something new.
In this project, I made a comforting mask for my partner who sometimes afraid to start a friendship because of the possibility of getting negative effects. When concluding the social identity issue from the interview, I immediately thought of the quote “Don’t judge a book by its cover”. There can be so much beauty and possibility of strong friendships if we get to know people better and are not afraid to start friendships even though caution is important. From there, this mask was inspired where when it’s dark or we are just starting to get to know someone, maybe that person can look dangerous, which here is indicated by the red wire. However, maybe behind it all there is the beauty inside that person that we can only know after getting to know them more closely on the brighter side.