My piece is a collage based on the song “Celebrity Skin” by Hole. I was listening to the song the other day, one I’ve heard plenty of times, but I never really thought about what it meant to me. I thought creating a new work of art with the song as inspiration would help me consider what I think it means.

“Oh, look at my face / my name is might have been / my name is never was / my name is forgotten… It’s so sugarless / hooker/ waitress, model / actress/ oh just go nameless!”

The lyrics above, to me, discuss identity. The song talks about a “hooker/waitress/model/actress” fading somewhere in Hollywood, she might have been something but never was, and so, I tried to depict these ideas in my visual piece. I did a collage to represent different pieces of identity. The girl is supposed to look like she is wilting away a little. She is youthful, she is aging—I tried to make it ambiguous. It looks like one thing farther away from it, and another thing closer up.

I think my representation of the song gives it a bit of a different meaning. My piece really portrays a girl aching. She is the main character of the piece, not the girl singing about her. Aging and fading away “somewhere” in Hollywood (not even a specific place), when she “could have been” something is really pretty sad, so I think my piece emphasizes that sadness a little more, or at least it tries to.