Biography
Ibrahima Diack is a 24-year-old intermedia and electronic arts student based between New Jersey and Philadelphia. His practice centers primarily on photography, with additional work in sculpture and digital media. Diack explores themes of distortion, abstraction, and the unfamiliar. Often transforming everyday environments into visually strange or unexpected compositions. His work challenges viewers to reconsider what they see, focusing on moments that feel slightly off or difficult to immediately understand. This interest extends into his sculptural work, where he creates irregular, inorganic-looking forms that resist easy interpretation. Across mediums, Diack is interested in pushing perception and encouraging curiosity, inviting viewers to question both the image/work and their own assumptions about it.
Artist Statement
My capstone artwork, Pieces&Movement, has changed drastically since I started. Originally, composed of a ton of individual photographs of my body compiled in a way that resembles an abstracted version of myself. I have since decided to attach the pictures to a chicken wire form I created that resembles a piece of my body. I didn’t want to change my idea too drastically in hopes of staying in theme with the original idea of abstraction and identity, while having a more visually interesting piece. The stop motion video will still be shown alongside it as planned. With it showing each body part methodically assembling themselves to form the abstracted human form, somewhat reminiscent of the orignal idea.
I’m doing this by using a scanner to scan individual parts of my body and then print them in the printer room. Whatever parts that were impossible to take with the scanner I took in front of the green screen and used in its place. After all the photos were taken, I created the stop motion video. Once fully done, I cut up the pieces of the photos of me, and assembled them methodically on my chicken wire sculpt. The final piece will be propped up on something so people can do a full 360 walk around it. I still also plan to use my projector and put it at a slight angle below the piece. This is to cast a shadow behind it to add an extra element to everything.
This work matters to me because it feels like a representation of how I tend to feel a lot. I intended for this to be about identity and how it’s shaped by tons of different moments or in this case photos. But I feel it slowly transitioned into being a visual representation of how feeling all over the place feels, at least to me. With 2 jobs, school, being a primary caretaker, etc it can sometimes feel like a lot. My distortion in this work feels like a representation of how things feel when things get hectic and you’re constantly bouncing from one place to the next.