I’m Jasmine Rodriguez, a current senior at the Kansas City Art Institute, majoring in Photography and minoring in Entrepreneurial Studies in Art and Design. My first introduction to photography was my senior year of high school. There, I learned and fell in love with the tactile process of shooting, developing, and printing film and images in the darkroom. At the time, a nature preserve was implemented behind my high school, allowing me to photograph the flowers that had bloomed. While the flowers were pretty, I continued the trend of using flowers in my work, the meaning of the flower changing as I changed.

My work at the moment includes elements of self-portraiture, flowers, and mirrors, along with the base elements of light and shadow. Using minimal and familiar elements in my work allows my subconscious to reveal itself within the images. I tend to work in the mode of make now, think later, meaning that I work solely based on intuition. It is during my downsizing and printing phases of my process that I start to dissect and give context to the images. This project is a visualization of a personal mindset. The darkness in the images are the “mind”, and I present my body in ways that depict movement throughout the mind. In most of the images, I’m interacting with my reflection in a large mirror, longing to be one with it. The flowers in the mirror are presenting an ideal situation, mindset, or something similar. The images that depict my body laying amongst the flowers shows full envelopment of the mindset, embracement and/or acceptance of it, or fighting to not be overtaken.