Video Sketch

How Important Is Being American to Your Identity?

2025

This project examines how the importance of American identity varies across racial groups in response to political narratives of inclusion and exclusion. Developed in collaboration with a political science scholar, the work translates the 2024 American National Election Survey (ANES), measuring the perceived importance of American identity into a visual structure.

Each portrait is overlaid onto an American flag backdrop and fragmented into a grid. The degree of fragmentation corresponds to an individual’s identity importance score: the more fragmented the image, the less central American identity is perceived to be. This visual disruption reflects how external political forces can subtly shape and destabilize one’s sense of belonging.

By embedding empirical survey data directly into the composition, the work positions portraiture as a site where personal identity and political structure intersect. The fractured imagery challenges the assumption that national identity is stable or uniformly experienced, instead revealing it as contingent, uneven, and responsive to broader political discourse.

Through the integration of data-driven logic and representational form, the project highlights the quiet but powerful ways political rhetoric influences how individuals understand themselves within the framework of American identity.