Identity

       In class lately we have been talking about identity as a theory in art.  As a student the topic of identity interests me in many ways.  I think being young I am not sure that my identity is concrete.  As a psychology student I could tell you that Erikson would believe me to be past the stage in my life that I question my identity and in fact I have a relatively concrete idea of who I am.  However, I do question my identity.  I see my art work as a way to explore new identities.  Not to say that I will change drastically any time soon or even over the years,  but I believe that most people do not stay completely stagnant.  It is my hope that I continually grow and change as I learn.  As I find myself in an academic institution I am constantly being challenged to see the world from a new perspective.  This is probably the time that I will be most inspired by identity in my artwork because I am constantly exposed to new information than changes my view of the world and of myself.  
       I was raised with an upper middle class backroud in the mid-west United States.  While we did not have everything that we wanted, we defiantly had more than we needed.  Our family was not always perfect, but I was not a product of divorce like many of my peers.  I lived pretty much the American Dream in a nuclear family.  We fit pretty much into a conservative's dream with the exception of my parents politics.  My father is a defense attorney who specializes in death penalty cases.  He is a believer in giving people second and third and fourth chances, and he has passed this down to me whether he likes it or not.  Probably because of this I choose to spend the last summer of my life in a boys youth correctional facility.  While I was always aware that many people's lives or maybe even most people's lives were not as fortunate as mine somehow this experience put it all into perspective.   These boys had not had the life that I did.  Most were raised without their fathers and some without either parent.  They were grew up with little resources and most were now raising families under this same situation.  The experience made me appreciate my life, and made me much more aware about what I wasn't doing to help out those less fortunate than I was.  I have found myself integrating these thoughts into my art a lot lately.  This thought process particularly reminded me of the artist Carrie Mae Weems, who we read about in out chapter on identity.  In her kitchen table series she poses in her at a kitchen table.  Her identity is completely made up of her surroundings, this is how we discover who she is.  The series can be found here and it is striking how differently you see her solely based on what is around her.  Just as I found it striking how different the boys in the correctional facility lives are then mine, based on their surroundings.