My project is about the relationship of the self and the memory through influential settings in my life and self portraiture. To represent these influential moments, miniature rooms exist inside the bodies of different zoomorphic self-portraits. Each room is, either real or made up, from specific moments in my life and each animal is an animalistic representation of how I felt in those moments. In times of intense pure emotion, I take on these beastly identities due to the widely accepted belief that logic is what defines intelligence and separates humans from animals. Naturally, any deviance from logic, such as strong emotion, is unintelligent, uncivilized and nonhuman. This project for me really comes down to wanting to accurately represent how I feel emotions and how my body and brain hold onto certain experiences. I want to be able to convey how these moments feel to me and how I feel in them. These pieces are a commentary on the recursive nature of living inside a memory that lives inside of you. These self-portrait animals live in these moments and exist in them but these moments live inside of them forever and therefore inside of me forever. Not the current me, but the version of me that was experiencing the memory to begin with.

–Lee Lançon