Seeing Differences with Desire: A Junior Conceptual Project by Patrick Ogaz (2014)

My core concept is exploring the feeling of jealousy resulting from the desire to rebel. This piece is related to my poem called ''Arms in a Cage,'' which explores the idea of two personalities that are held captive in a cage. The first personality has flowy arms that are able to extend themselves beyond the cage, showing rebellion. The other personality, witnessing this rebellion holds a greenish fog to show envy as it can't rebel. This piece parallels that idea. Rather than using literal cages to contain the personalities, I created two eyes with colored pencils in order to provoke a more organic and relatable feeling. The eyes are important to this piece because they yield the ability to see rebellion and are symbolic for perception. The left eye longs to be rebellious, but it lacks the skill necessary to do so. On the other hand, the right eye has long extended arms that reach outside the confinement of the cage, thus symbolizing rebellion. I made them using light art, which is a form of photography where a long exposure is used to capture a light trail. After this, I used Adobe Photoshop to manipulate the light into the form of hands. The lightning arms seen in the left eye are based on an image of a branch and they represent anger. The left eye's anger originates from its inability to rebel causing it to be jealous.