Freestyle Academy proudly presents

Obliquity: A Senior Surreal Photo by Cameron Fukuyama (2014)

My art depicts a tree growing from a pot made of flesh that is resting on a human hand in front of a skyscape. On the edge of the pot sits a hooded figure staring down over the edge into the sky. All of the images used were taken by me with the tree and the pot being HDR photos assembled using 3 different exposed photos and Photoshop's HDR automate tool. The pot is texture displaced and overlayed with an image I took of bacon to create the fleshly look that wraps around the pot. The whole piece is made of 7 separate images all masked, adjusted and assembled in Adobe Photoshop to give the composition a sense of unity and a surreal feeling to it.

I wanted my art to suggest an interpretation of nature and how it is both terrifying and beautiful at the same time with both aspects owing its significance to the other. The tree is meant to symbolize creation and beautiful side of nature, with plants and green usually invoking ideas of growth and peace, while the red fleshy pottery that the tree is growing out of it meant to symbolize the more visceral side of the world. The beauty, that is the tree, cannot exist without the brutal, disturbing existence of the pot. In turn, without the presence of the tree, the pot ceases to appear necessary or meaningful. My color scheme of complementary red and green went well with this concept as both colors seem to balance one another and make the other seem more important, much like the theme of the piece. The bonsai has a person sitting on the edge of the pot, and is resting in a human hand, in order to symbolize how humans are also caught up in this dichotomy. We have the ability to create and destroy and we ourselves are not above the rules of nature although we sometimes try to convince ourselves that we can control it.
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