Teri Frame + ArtLab

During her residency, Teri Frame led ArtLab interns through a comprehensive summer session filled with rigorous process and critical conversations exploring various themes reflected in her personal work. These themes include “normative” ideas of beauty, proportion, genetics, race and identity. Each intern explored various methods of mold making using wax, plaster and clay to create a literal interpretation of their own face and head (called clones by the youth). By starting conversations concerning contemporary notions of beauty as represented in the media and pop culture the students begin to take on a new perspective in respect to their own face. After completion of their clone Teri challenged each intern to curate a collection of photographs that expressed their take on issues discussed in the Learning Lab sessions. The last step in the process was to project these images onto their clone, which were photographed and compiled into a slideshow expressing a subjective narrative of themselves.

“To create this, we started off with making wax/plaster molds of each-others faces. It was kind of scary to be honest, but I survived! Then we talked about positives and negatives, going back and forth and transforming our pieces from one to the other until we had our last positive: the final piece. It took a lot of sculpting and time but now that it was over it was very much worth it.” -Chloë