Personalities.
Personalities is a video concept created during my freshman year in the Art Foundation program at VCU. We were tasked with our final project to be a performance piece, which I was absolutely dreading. I had no prior experience with acting, singing, or performing, nor did I want to attempt it for the first time for a final project.
I have always contemplated the idea of everyone having different facets of their personality that present in different situations, or to different people. The current slang for this idea is “code switching” which sounds quite shallow, but not entirely incorrect. As humans, we understand that you must act different ways in different settings to follow unspoken rules of society. For example, you wouldn’t act in front of your boss or grandmother the same way you would act in front of your closest friends, and vice versa. Instead of feeling shameful for discovering the different sides of myself, I wanted to explore them further.
For this project, I structured my video to mimick a Zoom call with nine different versions of “Maggie” (me!). I wrote a script, planned outfits, and chose different locations for each “Maggie”. It was definitely difficult to divide up nine versions of myself, it felt like I was filming Split but with just myself (I also don’t have a personality disorder). During the video, all of the Maggies are discussing project topics for the very project it was made for, and also her struggles as a first year art student. She talks about feeling like she doesn‘t belong, or maybe that she isn’t good enough. We hear some very inspirational words from “Soccer Maggie”, encouraging that we should be confident in ourselves and our abilities and that the project will work out no matter what we do. One of my favorite (and least favorite) Maggies enters the call very late, and seems to be sleeping the whole time, something I may or may not have done in actual classes.
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