Colleen A.J. Smith

#Unicorn# portrays an array of ‘avatar’ personalities created by users of the unicorn hashtag on the platform of Instagram.  Taking five different individuals from the growing and streaming Instagram hashtag feed, the artist displayed how people communicate their own contemporary and fantastical mythological narratives.   Choosing to symbolize the contemporary digitized social media representation of myth creation through the Classical Renaissance of traditional large scale oil medium illustrates the perpetual need to repurpose, create and communicate mythical narratives in contemporary settings. The medium and subject highlights the connection between old and new methods of telling and retelling the epic cycle myths of the human condition.