Please Note: This exhibition contains adult oriented content and is for viewers age 18+

Chris Noon — Hunger

Kailum Graves — I AM

Sohyun Lee — GABA Heaven

Robert Olawuyi — First person or whatever

blanche the vidiot — I aM aRe

blanche the vidiot — Kinga Toth: Masonry

Maybe Fake’s What I Like explores how we formulate our identities individually and communally. We experience many versions of ourselves over the course of a lifetime, changing so gradually that we don’t even notice. Sometimes you look back and can’t even recognize a past self; born-again Christians and recovered addicts often talk about feeling like their old self was an entirely different person. How do we reconcile past and future selves, people we might have been, or the multitude of people we currently are online and irl?

This opens up questions about integrity, authenticity, and organic/synthetic self-cultivation. We are each a different person with everyone in our lives, not necessarily because we lie about who we are, but because of the dynamic nature of relationships. It gets complicated when we attempt to synthesize those “selves” into a cohesive online representation. Is the goal of a social media or dating profile to create an accurate representation of who you are, or is it something more aspirational? Contradicting or omitting parts of yourself is inevitable — when exporting anything to a platform, information is bound to get compressed and corrupted — but what if that “you” isn’t you?

How does the cultivation of public persona, alter-ego, secret identity or anonymity influence how we come to understand ourselves? To believe in a “true”, “pure”, or “authentic” self disregards the creative and inherently performative nature of self presentation. Whether we log on to see friends or their personas or go to movies to see the films or the actors, at the end of the day, maybe we’re all just members of each other’s cults of personality.