Alter Ego's
I started working in the realms of Alter Ego's as far back as 2013 when I created my first Alter Ego 'SoUR SiMON' a persona developed over time to help with procrastination and imposter syndrome. Over the years different alter ego's have helped me creatively by looking at things from a different perspective, giving myself the freedom to try something different with a different name attached to the work.
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WhY THe SoUR FaCE?
SoUR SiMON wAs comPletLy ObseSseD WiTh ThE JoKeR. ModeLLinG hiS PerSonALity, AnD BlaminG HiS Un-ProDucTivE NatuRE oN ThE ValaiNouS CloWn.
SoUR SiMON embarked on the journey of writing and recording an album once of hip hop mixed with punk, the album artwork above is as far as it went..
Patient Zero
SoUR SiMON
SoUR SiMON is the first persona I adopted, and even now probably the most personal alter ego of mine, having created SiMON to originally to help get over imposter syndrome as a filmmaker, feeling that my full time job wasn't allowing me the time to be creative, and the time I did have, felt like it was wasted, as if I was just dropping in. I created SoUR SiMON as the ideal artist version of myself, the part of me that can do the things I was too worried to do becaus eof other commitments in life, whenever I did have spare time to work on film scripts and art work, I would transform myself into the persona, being the most idealistic artist version of myself, freeing myself up to be a full time artist, even though I had very little time. But it slowly came to a head that SiMON wasn't as idealistic as I first thought, one of the big ideas was that this way of working would push me to get more work done, being the single artist, SoUR SiMON with endless time on his hadns to be creative. But a week off work got me excited to jump into SiMON's shoes for the whole week, and be that full time artist in practice for the first time, I planned to finish the script I was working on. The week came and went, and SoUR SiMON procrastinated the whole week away on the sofa.. I erealised that having more time meant I had more time to get things done, so I'd keep putting it off until the next day. SoUR SiMON became a poersona I eventually had to kill off, making room for new personas to take his place.
Fig. 1
Kingslee Adams
During my Bachelors Degree in Sculpture at Carmarthen School of Art, I found myself struggling to find a personal stylistic approach to my art. My favourite artists are instantly recognisable.. Quentin Tarrantino movies can be sniffed out a mile off, Jake and Dinos Chapmans' sculptural and painted works have a distinct look and feel to them. I got myself into this terrible mind set that I had to 'discover' my style almost before creating any work, as not to make work that wasn't recognisable in my 'style'.
It took time to work this out, but when I started to work out who I was as an artist I found that part of me wanted to make bootleg action figures, not much sculpting skill involved, but highly conceptual, yet another part of me really wanted to sculpt figurative sculpture, and learn to sculpt and model skill fully. In this day and age of social media profiles being most artists' port of call, it's important that the profile becomes a representation of your portfolio, visually due to the nature of use of social media (stopping to look at someone profile for 3 seconds on average) My work is messy, I'm always jumping from one thing to another, I'll never create a consistent aesthetically pleasing profile.
I created Kingslee to play with these problems I was having. I separated that part of me, that little niggly feeling inside me that wanted to be a really proficient sculptor, I wanted to go to more life drawing classes and really learn anatomy, sculpting the nude figure it's poetic, and makes you feel like a 'real artist' (whatever that is) separating this part of my practice to its own profile gave Kingslee his own identity as an artist, I'd sculpt as Kingslee, arrogant, sophisticated and incredibly pretentious.
For the first time on social media, I had created a consistent, aesthetically pleasing artist account, it knew what it was, and when someone clicked on the page, they knew what they were getting, making it easier for people to follow, to talk about, to understand.
The reason I say the profile gave the persona a life of its own is that I posted a few sculptures and drawings on the page, then after a few weeks, that part of me was satisfied, I didnt feel the need to sculpt in that way for a while, so the profile was left alone. Whilst in the middle of another project I got an email from my course leader, Lisa Evans asking for me to bring some of kingslee's work in to be photographed for a magazine, this particular magazine was bold and colourful, and Kingslee's work would have fit perfectly (well, not that perfect because they didn't get picked to be shown in the end) And so i turned up the next day in costume, at the photography suit to hand the sculptures in dressed as Kingslee, obviously.
This was the solidifying point of my experiment. From that separation I was able to showcase a certain part of my practice isolated, and with that came opportunities to showcase the work, that otherwise, may never had been found amongst other random artwork, and it created an opportunity to do a day of performance, which I'd never done before. And ultimately, the character helped me work through some ideas I had about stylistic approach
The forever dramatic Kingslee showing off his impressive skill of talking way too loudly with his hands.. (above)
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At the time Kingslee was going through what they call his 'yellow' phase, Kingslee reports that his yellow phase was in fact intentional, calling it the yellow series, continuing, saying that he plans to conquer all the colours, when the feeling is right, of course. The Yellow series (above)
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The figure above was one of three sculptures created during a mid-night frenzy to have work ready to be photographed the morning after.
The series of white figures, faceless heads, usually featuring a crown, is a commentary on ones self, our birth rights, our history, we all have our crowns, sometimes they're forced upon us, sometimes they're given, sometimes our crowns are earned, sometimes the weight of carrying our crowns is just too much.
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Defective Dennis has no filter, exhibit A (above) shows Dennis, legs parted in a rather filthy looking bath tub with the words Faketrix written in kids foam bath letters, being a Faketrix resident, Defective Dennis here is breaking the fourth wall, indicating that he in fact, has no fucks to give.
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Being an avid creator of the random, collage is a natural place for Dennis to practice. The method is loose and creative, cutting up random images and mashing them up with something else.
In this particular instance, in his fake! magazine project (above) Dennis in his naturally political fashion created 3 pages dedicated to teaching the reader exactly how one becomes a snoopy cunt.
Experiment 2
Defective Dennis
Defective Dennis is the successor to the notorious SoUR SiMON, always living in his shadow, Defective Dennis was created to do the job SiMON never could.
I found myself holding back, not releasing work, always pushing to make my work perfect before showing anyone, the perfectionist had taken over, it meant that I was stuck in a circle of forever starting projects, but never finishing, more often than not, not even taking ideas through the development stage before deciding it wasn't good enough.
The perfectionist inside me has been there for a very long time, and SoUR SiMON, though created to destroy those thoughts became, in the end, the physical embodiment of perfectionism and imposter syndrome. Defective Dennis' role was to defect against these ideas that SiMON had built up over the years.
Defective Dennis is the rebellious punk inside me, the DaDa-ist the non-sensical part of me that wants to not care what people think of me of my art. During my original social media experiment Kingslee Adams and Defective Dennis were both created on the same day, their birth being the creation of their Instagram accounts, as a platform for them to exist.
Dennis' job was to not care, he drew drawings, scribbles and took photos of random things and without a seconds thought would post the art. Though it was still nerve wrecking to be posting without much thought, I was hidden behind an alter ego, an excuse that whatever was posted was not me, but this other guy.. it was obvious to people who discovered the account that it was me, but still, it was a place to posts things without care. The interesting part was that Defective Dennis' posts were getting about the same amount of attention as Kingslee's were.
Again, The Defective Dennis profile is still going, but hasn't been active for a while. Over the course of the defective experiment I learned to not be so judgemental of my own work, nothings perfect, and sometimes it's ok to share something that doesn't make much sense.
The real #1
Famous Artist Adam Holt
Born out of a question I asked myself whilst researching during my Sculpture Degree, "what makes a famous artist better than your average artist or student?" I was seeing students with very intelligent thought provoking art that could sit along side the works in any of the galleries I'd been to.
I figured that it's the confidence that artists like the YBA's (Young British Artists) have. They have the confidence to walk into a top gallery and place something like a fairy washing up liquid bottle on a plinth and say it's art.
Famous Artist Adam Holt was created to test this theory and also to provoke a reaction. In early 2021 I was invited to be part of The Fine Art Summer show in Carmarthen, where I turned up and placed a fairy washing up liquid bottle on a plinth, singed in sharpie 'Famous Artist Adam Holt'. I planned to turn up in full arrogant famous artist Adam Holt costume and attitude and tell everyone that their work was shit, and I'd also have a group of paparazzi follow me around and take interviews with me whilst I wore my shades. Unfortunately, in the end it would have just been my wife following me around taking photos of me, which I thought would be pretty weird, so I didn't do it in the end.
But after feedback on the piece I think maybe the bottle on it's own said what it had to say.
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Group #9
Hilario Offendas
"Hello! My name is Hilario Offendas, artist, and friend.."
As part of a collaborative group project at Swansea college of art on our Masters Degree programme we sparked a conversation around collective representation, fakery and thievery of art. We created a character, an alter ego of the whole group which comprised of 5 people, so though it's wrong to say Hilario is my alter ego, I am one of five people who make up Hilario, a new kind of alter ego experience for myself.
I ended up being the face of Hilario and a project that took place over a manic three week period was born in the form of the Fineart Bargain store.