Statement from the artist:

“My intention is to provoke the multifarious nature of personal identity in the struggle and balance between truth and charade. Used theatricality—more specifically the tensions between the self, persona and audience—as a framework for transformation, I want to reveal and rework the conventions of role playing. The exaggeration of action, costuming and expression pluck the body out of the norm and recapture it in a moment of transition from veracity to illusion and back again.”

“In my current work I have appropriated and altered the icon of the self portrait to re-examine when the relationship between self and persona becomes convoluted. Repeatedly showing my own body, in moments transformed into iconic characters through costuming, suggests that personal identity can be distorted by variable persona. However, these moments are juxtaposed with the exaggeration of raw and basic human nature through the consumption of food. Cake is not only a symbol of decadence, but it also mimics and underscores the moment when the natural is disguised and transformed by culture.”

More artwork can be found at Alex Luke’s Website: http://www.alexluke.com/index.html.