Customize Yourself: Relationship gameplay during the pandemic in the culture of comparison

Will you accept this rose? 

Left to our own devices for fifteen months, we have been immersed in an online space that was no longer voluntary but compulsory. With work existing remotely, video hangouts the new normal, and mobile dating apps and social platforms promoting safe digital ways to spend time with someone, there was no longer a way to opt-out of virtual existence.

This digital space still provides an escape. It is mouldable, shaped by imagination, where there are infinite ways to tweak your identity to your own desire[1]. Identity curation has never been more paramount than in a space where it is inescapable.

Relationships have evolved from the romantic comedy meet-cute to a ruthless multiplayer game where the virtual controls more than the real. We swipe right and left to find a match. We melt into our online avatars, swapping identities like phone numbers, each selfie implying a different version of ourselves. The wardrobe of identities we carry from LinkedIn to Tinder means there are infinite variations of you. Combing through the breadcrumbs left by romantic partners and deciphering emojis like modern hieroglyphics, we seek meaning from the meaningless. Instagram has become the new religion, breeding a culture of comparison.

The rules change any minute within sixty, any hour within twenty-four, any day within a calendar. There is a sense of urgency to the evolution of our digital fantasy. It is all a calculated performance; the best version of our many faces. Which ‘you’ is the realer you?[2]

I confront this performance of self in my paintings. Dissecting the curated identities next to the romantic failures, analyzing how fictional versions of myself bleed into reality. I simultaneously own my painted masks and yet fail to, only existing for the perverse enjoyment of others.

Each larger-than-life selfie captures a visceral and raw moment; not unique to the artist’s existence, but felt deeply throughout the isolation of the previous year during the pandemic idling. The sting of an insult, pain of rejection, or flush of sexual excitement are being presented as content to consume in an unequivocally millennial shade of pink. The saturation of pink in my work projects an ideal of self: embodying eroticism, longing, and the promise of love. It separates the work from reality. Pink itself is a fantasy, an escape.

My work is representational of my generation’s desire to act in the movie of our own lives. The world we have constructed has turned tangible experience pale in comparison to the imagined landscape we’ve created for ourselves. The body has become a medium for culture. Culture is the story we spin to ourselves about who we are.[3]

Each painting challenges the careful curation of personas, our imperfect existence, and the ambivalence towards romantic partners in the digital era through a pandemic lens. Every representation is another clue to unravelling the identity that I’ve carefully constructed ever so subconsciously and consciously. Drawing inspiration from user interfaces, gameplay, and sexting, my oversized and ephemeral selfies demand to be removed from their analog context to be placed back in the virtual world.

All games have rules. Game never over.

[1] Gillespie, Tarleton. Custodians of the Internet: Platforms, Content Moderation, and the Hidden Decisions That Shape Social Media. Yale University Press, 2018. 300.

[2] Ibid

[3] Ibid, 359.