Rowan Hoyt

thesis title
sculpture concentration

I'm exploring portraiture, representation, and unconventional means and materials to depict subjects.

This year I intend to delve into the concept of what accuracy is when pertaining to a subject's true nature, and how the appearance of a person may or may not reflect the reality of how they identify, how they act, what they value, and a thousand other vital parts of their life and humanity.

As a trans individual myself, this subject is quite close to my heart. I, as well as many people I know, have never quite felt that a statue of them would come close to showing them for who they are. There is a tyranny of lifelike art in that it confines the subject to no more then the skin deep, and the artist to depicting only outermost appearances.

To accomplish this goal I will choose a few subjects who I know well (at least to start, I may venture into attempting this for strangers later), and interview them extensively to learn what experiences and values most define them in their own eyes. I will then attempt to abstract what i have learned from the interviews into majority "non representative" forms, with only occasional recognizable snippets, which over the whole will come together as an abstracted and somewhat surreal final product comprised of homages to the subject's defining features, characteristics, memories, hopes, and fears.