Artist Statement

     Fashion has a powerful influence on the way people perceive each other. Within fractions of a second, any number of characteristics are attached to a person's identity based on what he/she is wearing. From economic class to political ideology, from sexual orientation to educational background, clothing is heavy with labels.


     Owen Eric Wood's The Clothes Make the Man is an interdisciplinary project in which a series of photographs are animated to depict the artist dressing up in a wide-range of outfits. Video is projected on a life-size sculpture made of cellophane, a material that references consumerism and acts as a metaphor for transparent facades. As the video loops, the artist sits at a table repeating a seemingly endless act of cutting out and assembling paper dolls of himself. As he dresses and undresses himself in the likeness of the images projected before him, his face and body are wrapped in plastic to cut off viewers from accessing the real person who is missing in the two-dimensional representations.


     The fact that only one person is seen taking on so many identities, it becomes clear these identities are artificially-imposed costumes since no single person could be all of the personalities depicted. Despite this, viewers can't help attaching personality traits to the artist. We have been conditioned to define the social status of people we see on the street based on material positions. We have been taught that clothes can tell us if a person is conservative, artistic, middle class, university educated, hard working, married or any number of characteristics. And so the artist attempts to construct himself in the image of societal expectations, but in this futile act he introduces a critique of a behavioral system we are all caught within.