Keeley Pledge, How to live your most authentic life [×]

Consumption of social media is at an all-time high, and has become an essential form of interaction, especially during COVID. Social media has become a way to escape the everyday; its routines, moments and encounters that over time become repetitive and mundane.
However, at the tip of our fingers, we all can now filter and represent our lives to make them more appealing to the world of social media. Photos are curated, using filters or pre-sets, to achieve the "perfect" feed. The everyday has become a set for Instagram, and Instagram has become a stage for everyday life. The real everyday has been altered to fit a specific image of what the perfect Instagram user or feed looks like. This approach not only affects the authenticity of what people post but also how people conduct their everyday lives.
This body of work is not anti-social media – actually quite the opposite, embracing this new reality becoming both a fan and skeptic. It is a provocation to live your most authentic life through the use of social media.
This project uses the space of the home, that was once private but now public, once interior, now folded into the gaze of social media.
‘How to live your most authentic life’ conflates techniques used in set design; framing, staging, filtering and cropping in order to create a speculative approach to the apparently effortless ‘instagrammable’ house. Interior spaces become a backdrop for these everyday moments which have been specifically curated using techniques of conflation and juxtaposition, in order to create humorous, ironic and occasionally disturbing encounters. The work will look at how different identities occupy the space of the home varying for each individual. The project celebrates the less ‘instagrammable’ everyday moments we partake in.