Unmasking Hypermasculinity
Role: Art Direction (Branding, Projection Mapping)
Timeline: 3 Months
Tools: Blender, Peperkura, Adobe Illustrator, Adobe After Effects, Adobe Photoshop
Deliverables: Projection Mapping Installation, Branding
The Challenge: The three most toxic words to young black men are “Be a man.” From an early age, boys are taught to hide their emotions behind the mask of hypermasculinity. This mask exaggerates qualities such as physical strength, aggression, and sexual dominance.
The mask of hypermasculinity can lead to violence, abuse of women, and buried emotions. This project highlights the problem of hypermasculinity by placing negative imagery prevalent in the media into a new environment and de-normalizing such imagery.
As young black men and others in society become more aware of this prevalent and oppressive mask, we can begin to change harmful stereotypes. Young black men can create their own definition of what it means to “be a man.”
The goal of the is project was to bring awareness to how toxic hypermasculinity in media is to you men of color. My goal was to take the media out of its normal context and place it into a new one to show how absurd hypermasculinity is.
Each section was individually cut assembled and each part with a custom cut wooden backing.
The large sculpture started off as a 3D scan of my young nephew’s face, it was then deconstructed to allow multiple images to be played on different sections of the face.
These are rough early 3d scan, that were deconstructed into more basic shapes.
Projection mapping was used to develop this project.
