EVE BISHOp

Id, Ego, Superego is inspired by various album covers for musician Anderson .Paak, conceived by artist Dewey Saunders. I was intrigued by Saunders’ colorful collage style, influenced by the surf and skate culture of South Florida. I wanted to take my own approach to creating a series of album covers. I began looking into the surrealist movement for more inspiration. I studied the collage work of René Magritte, specifically. I was inspired by the surrealists’ aim to explore the human subconscious and dreams. I channeled the chaotic, somewhat random nature of the subconscious, using a combination of arbitrary images with pictures of personal significance. In each piece, I included childhood photos of myself as well as old photos of my great-grandmother. The colorful backgrounds represent the layered, complicated nature of the human psyche. I added elements of absurdity, placing images in ways that make no physical sense. At the center of each piece is a large image of myself. I took these portraits using a tripod, drawing lighting inspiration from Renaissance portraits. I abstracted my face in each by cutting it into several pieces. This represents the opening to my subconscious mind. The titles of the album covers, Id, Ego, and Superego, are the three parts of Sigmund Freud’s theory for the structure of the human psyche. The inclusion of these words relates the surrealist style of the collages to the work of Freud, whose studies of dreams and the subconscious significantly affected the artistic movement.