This thesis serves to examine my practice as a visual artist. In its contents I consider both the internal image and the external image and the constant negotiation that happens between these two sets of images. What comes to represent the internal is my own image, in particular, my face. What comes to represent the external are prevailing images of socially idealized beauty. Likewise, I argue that the face becomes especially important in this negotiation as it is the intersection between the internal and the external; the self and the social. Using artists such as Vito Acconci, Orlan, and Andy Warhol, as well as other thinkers such as Jean Baudrillard, Judith Butler, David Byrne, Amelia Jones, Carl Jung, Jacques Lacan, Susan Stewart, Kurt Vonnegut and Brian Wilson, I assert that what makes my artistic images powerful is simply my willingness to enact and display a kind of tangible struggle that is absent from these external images
