Black & White

Black & White are some of my most developed pigments, as they resemble beginning and ending points in my life and the monotony of it all.

As all of these colors flow in my mind, I often can relate more to the absence of them. At the lowest points in my life I have felt a deep lack of personality and independence. As a people pleaser and libra I have this need for balance, and that often comes at the expense of having a more prominent voice for myself.

It became all too easy for me to decline offers to spend time with my friends in high school because of my position as the person who did all the work on a group project or took on too many extracurriculars to function as a normal human.

In one of my more recent art pieces I explored the concept of copy pasting others onto myself.

In the piece I was able to explore more about my intellectual identity as more than myself but as a part of the people around me. With the action of developing parts of myself to match those around me and the personalities I have met, it acts as a protective shield. Then theoretically if somebody does not like me, they just do not like the patchwork I have made of parts of different people and not necessarily ME.

As touched upon with Circles, Yesterday, and The Long and Winding Road by The Beatles, black and white bring to the table a sense of conformity and longing for something more in order to break from the monotony.

Last year I was sitting in the office of my high school when my dad texted me that my uncle had passed away. This was probably the closest I have felt to black and white, as there seemed to be a major disconnect between not only me and death but me and my uncle. I felt this numbness, but where did it stem from?

I had not visited Massachusetts in almost 15 years so the only memories I possessed of him were faint and far between. I questioned if I could feel all these other colors for my uncle. Or should every memory of him stay black and white due to his recent absences in my life?

Could I feel red for not spending time with him, orange for the melancholy surrounding his passing, yellow for all the good times we had had, green for growing his legacy and never forgetting how I grew up with him, blue for the utter sadness of death, purple and pink for the sad love that I think I felt for him?

Black and white, all of these colors in fact, have been a source of power for me to take on different masks and listen to others more than I myself talk. They have given me a sense of duty to myself and the people around me as I attempt to figure out exactly how my intellectual identity encompasses the people I have met and their important stories.

WORKS CITED

Sieberg, Kimberly. “Black & White” Spotify, Created by KimiSieb, March 2021. https://open.spotify.com/playlist/7A7MMRtO48r8BCy16ptNJx?si=YSgHwDD_Tr-UOtSYjQ0Frg

*Note: All photography is by me. Yes, I might be too lazy to cite them all because most of them do not have titles but their years range from 2015 to 2020