Through Mormonism

I knew what I wanted to do for this assignment almost immediately after it was given to us. I’m not sure why, but I’ve always had a weird relationship with my religion. Not a bad one by any means. I feel like I have always been a fairly religious person. Despite this, I think I have always taken a much different path than those of my peer group. There was a time in my life when I got really into raves and EDM. This was something I felt the need to express when I got this assignment. At first I wanted to find an actual painting of the Joseph Smith portrait I just found. Later I decided to do it on Photoshop because I liked the way pieces of photos fit together.

            There is a very unique artist named Matt Paige who inspired the work I did. He’s what I would call a “Mormon pop artist.” He takes existing photos and paintings of church leaders and turns them into something modern, or clever. I took his idea of taking religious art, and making it into something modern that really related to me. In this case, I used my past and combined it with a very important piece of art to a religion that is very important to me.

The readings talked about taking something and detaching it from the artist or even the subject matter. The art suddenly belongs completely to the audience and they are allowed to do with it what they will. The art I chose is something very important to me and does help me to think more about my religion. I do honestly think my view of the piece was never really what the artist wanted it to be. I feel like the artist was meant to depict Joseph as a great and powerful man, but with my remix, he becomes me. Joseph was always someone trying to find who God really was, and I feel like I found something unique and spiritual about music and the closeness I experienced at raves. This, I feel, was nothing like what the artist actually intended, but that is what the portrait became for me.

I never really saw the portrait as a way for me to show my own navigation through my religion until we got this assignment. I am now, however, very glad I came to see it this way. It made me think a lot about my past and the reason I made the decisions I did. It was cool to see how my two lives merged into this new portrait.