Rise of the Alters

Rise of the Alters ©2012  Photos courtesy of the Office of Diversity at MICA.



     When you're alone in the dark and the doors are closed and locked, there is always someone else in the room. Rise of the Alters celebrates the idea of alter ego in all of us and reflects the mirror on the mask we all wear. The vision of Amelia Stinnette and Erik Clark's line is a hyper-realized version of their lives and minds; almost a parody, but more so an exaggeration of their alternate egos and lives. Through the eyes of Alter (Clark) and the Big Martian (Stinnette), viewers will see a culture that presents an intense, honest version of themselves. Their focus is to provoke the question "what is the true self and what is a mask?" by drawing from influences such as African garb, afrofuturism (an aesthetic that combines elements of science fiction, historical fiction, fantasy, Afrocentrificty and magic realism with non-western cosmologies in order to critique the present-day dilemmas of black people and re-examine the historical events of the past) and post-apocalyptic astronomy, a sub-genre of science fiction.