Identical Twins and Art
摘要
Past artwork focused on identical twins has been minimal before the last 50 years and focused on the relation of myths, a record of the family, or the imagined personification, the abstract manifestation, of internal tensions and conflicts. Artwork on living, identical twins largely focused on formal family portraits from the 1600s to the later 1900s and depicted twins as mirror images with only hints at internal differences that the artist fixed, often in the artificial constraint of an intellectual duality. Artwork on twins has expanded somewhat during the last 50 years, leveraging modern technology. A lot of activity still focuses on portraits, but utilizing medium-format cameras to provide a more detailed, minute comparison of the twin siblings. A bigger innovation has been the use of twins in art to offer the exotic or entertaining. There has been little to no art coming from the premise that identical twins are dynamic singletons pursuing their own lives in a contingent fashion, reacting to external circumstances in a personal way, engaged in setting their own boundaries and creating their own scenes in an ad hoc, fluid manner. Yet it is precisely here, in the random differences identical twins generate, that the medical science community has found the most fertile thinking. As a result, a wide gap has now opened up between the art world and the medical profession, which now seeks to better identify and understand the differences between identical twins and the implications of these differences. Trina has tried with some of her latest artwork to close, at least a little, this gap in the consideration of twins. She has sought to portray twins in their own right, make them relatable, set them in real-world scenes with drama and action, highlight their lived experience, and explore more broadly the range and meaning of the differences they encapsulate.