This research project, Return of the Polynesian Phantom, investigates self-portraiture through the mediums of moving image, digital modeling, object making, and installation. It seeks to consider in these media an ambiguous threshold between lightness and darkness, the real and the fabricated. The proposition that it explores is that it is at such ambiguous thresholds that notions of identity are negotiated, and where the perception and interpretation of symbolic meaning renders identity phantom.
