Lara Barylko: Portraits

“At the time of this project I had just moved into my neighbourhood so I saw this as an opportunity to get to know where I’m living through my neighbours and their perspectives. However, figuring out how to represent this, the people and what I learnt and discussed visually, took some time. I’m a 2D artist with a focus on portraits, lately, so early on I decided I wanted to make a small piece for each person I interviewed, that would then be combined to make one big piece. A way to show that each individual is a unique piece that makes up our community. Each portrait is a 20-40 min conversation I had with each person and the transcripts of those conversations are just as important as the visuals themselves because I couldn’t condense the amount of things we discussed into the visuals or at least, I felt I had to sacrifice it for the sake of creating an understandable and attractive visual theme. Reading our conversations as well will give you a fuller picture of these people than just seeing their faces.”