Liam Neupert
Look Both Ways
Class of: 2024
Major: Fashion Design BFA
Medium: Cardstock paper and mechanical connectors
Faculty: Aviva Maya Shulem
Prompt: For Project 2 - Object and Community identity. We were tasked to explore community and identity through the medium of planar material. We began with research about what a community is, how they are formed, and finally chose a certain community/identity we wanted to base our project around.
For my project I wanted to expand on two intersections of my personal identity and communities that come from that. First I chose my Indian heritage, a part of me that I didn’t grow up embracing and is something that I haven’t had a strong community around. Second I chose my queer identity, which has been a huge community for me throughout my life. To begin I started by researching artists from both communities to influence my end product. For the physical object I wanted to explore the ideas behind the gender binary. As a nonbinary person breaking down the ideas of gender was a process I explored through my queer community and looking into the history of queerness in India. This all manifested into me understanding what it means for me to be nonbinary and how this identity is also a way of reclaiming a culture that was lost suppressed through colonization. In the end I created a lamp to explore those ideas and of course incorporate the styles and motifs of the artists I took inspiration from.
