They used to call me extra.
It was just my face telling the truth. For most of my young life people could read me before I opened my mouth. Whatever I was thinking was already on my face. I could not hide it, and for a long time that unsettled me.
It took years to understand what I was actually carrying. Sorrow, love, disappointment, breakups, grief. All of it lands on a person and none of it leaves clean.
Some of us come out better. Some come out worse. Some of us stay exactly where we were. But every one of us has been through it, and every one of us wears it whether we like it or not.
I grew up on the Lower East Side. Once I understood what I was carrying, I started watching for it in everyone else: on the subway, in my Harlem studio, in recovery rooms, in the places where nobody is performing.
That is what this series examines: identity, vulnerability, and what perception costs a person. The emotions we think set us apart are the same ones everybody else is carrying. What looks like the thing that divides us is the thing that makes us human.
Harlem taught me to notice faces before I noticed art.
Long before the aluminum, I was already building: two t-shirt lines that ended up worn on national television without me chasing it, a magazine, a blog, a song under the name Rex Wes. None of it was practice.
During the pandemic, while working on a home decor line, I kept testing surfaces until I landed on a process for printing on aluminum. The first time I saw a face come through that metal, lit from inside, I stopped thinking about decor and started thinking about faces. Unapologetic Faces is where it landed.
I chose aluminum because light moves through it the way it never moves through paper or canvas. A piece looks different depending on where you're standing and what time of day it is.
Every work is one of one, on archival museum-quality aluminum or framed fine art, signed and archived on acquisition. Once a piece is acquired, it leaves circulation for good.
How an Archetype Emerges
Throughout my life, people have shared parts of themselves with me without being asked. Sometimes it happened in conversation. Sometimes while sitting on a bus or train. Sometimes through friendship, loss, celebration, or quiet observation. What stayed with me was never simply what they said. It was what happened as they said it.
Every work begins with a feeling. I watched faces change. A burden became lighter. A guarded expression softened. Tears became relief. A smile appeared where there hadn't been one before. Those moments revealed something universal to me. Beneath every personal story was a shared human experience.
That realization became the foundation of Unapologetic Faces.
I don't create specific people. I create archetypes born from emotion, memory, observation, and imagination. Through my own proprietary creative process, I combine modern technology with traditional artistic principles, allowing each work to evolve through color, composition, symbolism, and refinement until it expresses the emotional truth I experienced.
Every archetype is an interpretation, not of one individual, but of all of us. Our faces often tell our stories long before we ever speak.
A full circle moment.
When Goddard Riverside gave me my debut at the Bernie Wohl Center on the Upper West Side, I shared the platform with two other artists rather than keep the night for myself. 150 came out for wine, cheese, and three bodies of work sharing the walls.
Guests wanted to know what drove the work, and I kept coming back to the same answer: these are archetypes, not portraits of one person. Ayiana Viviana, who showed alongside me that night, put it plainly. She had seen the images online beforehand and thought they were strong, but nothing fully landed until she stood in front of them. Online, they read well. In the room, she said, they gravitate.
One woman who came out that Friday saw Two-Faced and told me she had to see it in person. People stayed behind after to hear me speak.
Our faces are battle scars, never meant to hold us back, built instead to make us stronger. Facing our own ugliness is what makes us human, and that is why some of these faces wear it.
Over years, I sat with people who let me into what they usually keep hidden: shame, guilt, the mistakes they kept beating themselves up over. I listened, and when it was my turn, I told them the truth: I have been there too.
Something changed every time someone let themselves be honest instead of defending themselves. That is when I stopped seeing survivors and started seeing proof, that a face can tell the truth before a single word gets spoken.
None of these faces belong to one person. They belong to every conversation that got real, every person who let their guard down long enough to be known.
What looks specific to one face turns out to be shared by everyone who looks at it, because we all want the same thing: to be seen, even in our darkest moments. Especially then.
Have a question? Start with Carol.
Collector inquiries and acquisitions are managed from start to finish by Carol Ward, Collector Relations. Carol also represents Corey Wesley through her gallery, Outside the Lines Gallery.
