Sarah D. Kingsley

• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 
• 

Senior Thesis Show - University of Rochester

We all have a proclivity to identify a depicted subject’s experience as our own, and portraiture is uniquely positioned to evoke empathetic response. Within this show I experiment with the classic painted form of portraiture with my work from the first semester and delve into the selfie as portraiture in my most recent work.
As a computer scientist and a feminist, I am interested in the equal representation of women in the fields of STEM (Science, Technology, Engineering and Mathematics) and believe portraiture can play an important role in the fight towards increasing the number of women in these fields. Specifically in software engineering, there is a significant decrease since the mid-1980s of women interested in careers in technology because of the appearance of home computers and videogames that were marketed towards boys and men. In this first part of the exhibition, I have created representations of women who are majoring in STEM fields at the University of Rochester as we try to achieve better gender balance in these fields. Here, I present portraits of individual women surrounded by images they submitted to me as representations of the work they do. These images reflect the conceptual worlds these women create with science and math to lend understanding to the realities that call them to their fields.
When Donald Trump was elected President of the United States, I felt compelled as an artist, an activist and a millennial to respond. Since major players and average people alike utilize smart phones to receive, react, and communicate information in response to the election, mobile interfaces took on an important role in this project. In this second part of the exhibition, I use this interface to foreground the faces of loved ones, friends, and those affected at the center of this struggle. For millennials, the selfie is a perfect format to create this expression. In a web application designed to be open source and very simple, so that other digital artists can easily add their own work, the user can place a filter over a picture taken with a smart phone (1,2,3,4). These filters feature words and images that have resonated through social media since the election. They are the words of the political and the personal, and will be representative of our struggles in years to come. Through their circulation on social media, these texts and visualizations can be shared and gain power as they are viewed.
My work is connected by the depiction of individualized faces and by representations of shared experiences circulated through social media. The audience is encouraged to relate to the experiences of both the singular women that I depict and the images of collective thought that I share on social media, creating a network of communication that empowers viewers to imagine the potential of radical social relations.