For my photo essay, I decided to represent my current worldview and lack of meaningful existence by making eggs. Why make eggs to represent a breakdown of meaning? As anyone who knows me will attest, I love puns and comedy and using humor. I believe in the power of humor when discussing and thinking about difficult topics. In society this can be illustrated in media figures like Jon Stuart, Trevor Noah, Samantha Bee, John Oliver and a host of other anchors who bring attention to topics by covering then through their shows. They cover news and political issues and draw attention to them through their influential position in mainstream media; however, they keep viewers interested and engaged through the use of humor. If The Daily Show, Full Frontal, and Last Week Tonight did not use humor, people would be far more uninterested and thereby less informed. The anchors of these shows use humor to discuss serious topics that are otherwise daunting and difficult to look at.
These people and the teams that work to create these anchors and their content inspire me. As a Sociology and Political Science major, I deeply appreciate how they use their positions to bring attention to social/political issues. But they go a step further by making it easy to follow along in the interest of public interest and information sharing. As a person and someone who is struggling to look at my existential crisis head on, I appreciate the approach of adding humor to make difficult topics easier to conceptualize and discuss. Creating this project and making it through this semester has been difficult without feeling like I have any purpose or direction. Examining my worldview-the one I don’t fully understand- was and is incredibly difficult. WRITING about it for a grade felt like ripping out my heart, staring into it, then mashing it onto a page. Through this, humor has been a crutch and a painkiller that makes it easier for me to examine my worldview and my search for meaning. Back to eggs. The format of eggs really does have to do with my worldview. I identify with the Dada movement of early 1900’s. Dada simply was a movement of randomness; a political and social movement of art that rebelled against the idea that all art had a meaning and that it was to be deeply examined and scrutinized. Dada and the concept of inherent meaning are at ends with each other, which made the concept of Dada so fitting to the format of my project. Dada and Dada artists had a tone of sassiness and satirical humor that also made me appreciate the style and definition of the movement. The randomness of eggs fit well in the principles of Dada, and I could use them as a medium for humor and artistic representation of how I feel. Part of the representation of eggsistentialism was being physically in a kitchen. Every time I go into kitchens and start to cook, I feel uncomfortable at my lack of skill and my unfortunate tendency to mess up a recipe. I have always wanted to be better at cooking and baking and I want to be comfortable in simply BEING in a kitchen. Deciding to represent my worldview in food meant stepping out of my comfort zone and addressing head on my kitchen issues. Symbolically, it meant that I would address the daunting thoughts of existentialism and meaning head on and with no holds barred. I would flip eggs, dammit. Let's get cooking. |