19-year-old artist Aliza Razell creates beautiful narratives in her mixed-media photographs by combining self-portraits with splashes of color to produce strange and mystifying images that cannot fully be explained. The beautifully thoughtful moments seem perfectly planned out so that the components can be naturally blend together into meaningful stories.
Razell manipulates each image so that the various photo and paint elements interact in unexpected ways. As a result, the dull, monochromatic backgrounds become alive with vibrant watercolors splattered across the photographs. The images are part of two ongoing series, Anesidora (top four), which is inspired by the myth of Pandora’s Jar (which the artist explains is “jar,” not “box” because since the 1400s it’s been mistranslated into Latin and then English as a box). And, the second series (bottom four) is inspired by the Finnish word “ikv,” which means the feeling of missing someone/-thing.
