Exhibition: Selfie-Actualization

Welcome to the Museum:

You made it! Phew! This museum isn’t easy to find! It’s for the dedicated! The devoted! The committed…those who demand the highest quality from their image-seeking quests! Also, for those who like the unmarked door…the secret knock…the cognoscenti… those who are… in the know. Please, enjoy…and spread the word judiciously…perhaps keep this amongst your closest thousand friends…and ask them for a similar courtesy.

About the Exhibition:

Exhibition entitled Selfie-Actualization by photographer Kevin Brown. MODP is a visual platform for photographies of adjacency and adjudication…a design-forward ethos…an abandoned Victorian Pavilion overcome by the jungle of the creative. If none of that made immediate sense, let it be stated simply: MODP invites photographers who needed to do it their way. You know, the Frank Sinatra song. Artists who were misfits…not necessarily for the sake of it…but for the sake of their art. For authenticity to their journey as creatives, they produced work that was and is…different. Meaningful. Fun. Inscrutable. And probably not commercial.

Selfie-Actualization is a pun, in case you hadn’t noticed. It refers to Maslow’s fifth level in his hierarchy of needs. If you are unfamiliar with the hierarchy, it is a theory that suggests an individual progresses through five different stages with each a prerequisite to the next: BASIC (food, air, water, etc.); SAFETY (shelter, society, rules, etc.); LOVE (intimacy, family, belonging, etc.); ESTEEM (societal recognition, accomplishment, etc.); SELF-ACTUALIZATION (realizing one’s creative potential).

The hierarchy has been problematized, and I will leave that for the reader to research elsewhere. I am neither a defender nor an apologist for it; I find it a handy prism for refracting personal motivation. I often use it backwards, asking myself what level does a decision in my life seek to satisfy. And, as an artist, you may imagine that much of what I have done relates to level five.

Full disclosure: I used to disdain selfie culture. I used to find it pathetic and sad when people overdid it with attempts at self-glamour. I believe the universe is a mirthfully ironic mastermind: what does it give us? Exactly what we might need for humility. I may have, through image manipulation, created more replications of a self-image than almost any other human being in history—not sure how we could count this…and, to be accurate, the replication work comes from another exhibition…Hyper-Kevin-01…so let us return to the current body of work.

Selfie-Actualization seeks to find an improbable equilibrium: how can an artist achieve self-evacuation and selflessness through a long-term commitment to constant self-imaging? How does the “subjective” saturate the subconscious to the point of becoming almost “objective”? It happens when the self becomes the laboratory equipment and the petri-dish and the bacterial colonies with which the artist-qua-visual-scientist works.

Did I decouple and sublimate? Did I lose myself and find myself in the process? Did I actualize through something silly and fun and unintentional? Do I take something serious and also brush it off at the same time? I can leave these questions to you…to you to ponder…to you to forget…to you to attempt, empirically, to verify for yourself. For we are all mad scientists in our laboratories of creativity, trying to reanimate a feeling, a likeness, a self, a hodos…we seek level five so that we can leave it and begin work on level six projects.

Photographer’s Bio (excerpt):

This particular exhibition is by a photographer whose work spans 5 decades, from early days as a child capturing images of residential streets and sand dollar collections to life in his floating thirties as a young professional in Tokyo and Taipei…and then, to a reckoning with stillness, place, loneliness and its antithesis (for this particular artist): creative fulfillment through work.