Meg Mitchell

2020-06-22 - Meg mitchell

Birthday

Birthday is an exploration of birthday traditions. Having grown up in an American culture without a strong, common tradition surrounding the anniversary of our births, I’ve always felt slightly disappointed on my birthday. Every year is different and some birthdays pass with barely an acknowledgment, while others carry great weight and importance. In an attempt to better understand what it feels like to have a strong birthday tradition, I fabricated one for myself by imaging that I traveled to a different country each year to eat their traditional birthday dessert or celebratory food.

Presented here is a catalogue of the foods I pretended to have eaten. To create boundaries and structure in the work, I used my grapheme-color synesthesia (I perceive numbers and letters in association with colors) to determine the background and foreground colors, based on the year. For example, I perceive the number 2 as pink and the number 8 as dark blue, so the photograph on the cover from 2018 is presented on a pink and blue backdrop. Below is a key to all of the numbers.

Color key:

0. White

1. Black

2. Pink

3. Lime green

4. Cobalt Blue

5. Red

6. Dark brown

7. Yellow

8. Dark blue

9. Medium brown

Sellou, Morocco, April 24, 2009