Paul Campbell and Dominic Paul Moore are currently showing recent work at the Moreau Art Galleries at Saint Mary’s College in Notre Dame, Indiana in an exhibition entitled Profile Me. Both artists use popular virtual community sites to examine contemporary portraiture and personality.

Campbell creates oil on canvas figurative portraits based on Facebook users’ self-appointed profile pictures. His energetic canvases cause the viewer to evaluate an individual’s desire to portray a personality through a single image. The artist states, “they’re essentially self-portraits that I project, and the projection itself distorts them, but it turns them into this painted object that makes them different from the quick image one might view online.”

Moore’s work has a rather morbid premise. The artist utilizes the site MyDeathSpace.com, an archival site of obituaries of MySpace members with links to their profiles. His gouache and graphite photo-realistic drawings mirror the virtual profiles that continue to exist after the life of the user has passed, creating a slightly haunting posthumous profile. The above image, Mandii, provides an artistic memento mori while bringing the viewer face to face with Mandii’s mortality and the immortality of the Internet. MySpace has previously been included in both Time Magazine and PC World’s rankings of the worst web sites to visit, a conceptual catapult for this particular body of work.

Profile Me will remain at the Hammes Gallery at the Moreau Art Galleries until September 26, 2008.