Meet the Artist

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.

Understanding

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.

Observation

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.

The Practice

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 bringing the work onto aluminum. The first time I saw a face come through that aluminum, 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.

I carried emotions from my own life and from encounters with people who trusted me with parts of theirs. Some I met only once. The feelings stayed with me, but I did not have an outlet for everything I wanted to express. Advances in modern technology gave me a way to bring those feelings into my art.

My work begins with writing. I use Photoshop, Illustrator, digital manipulation, and technology-assisted tools alongside traditional artistic principles to develop the faces through composition, color, and refinement. I make the decisions about what the work expresses.

I wanted to tell stories through faces without using a real person's likeness to represent someone else’s experience. Creating archetypes lets me express the emotion an encounter left with me while respecting the privacy and dignity of the people who shared their lives with me. What they trusted me with stays private. The work carries my interpretation of the experience.

When Goddard Riverside gave me my debut at the Bernie Wohl Center on the Upper West Side, I curated the show and invited Scott M. Lilly and Ayiana Viviana to show with me rather than keep the night for myself. The RSVP list passed 300 for wine, cheese, and three bodies of work sharing the walls. Goddard counted 150 in the room.

Guests wanted to know what drove the work, and I kept coming back to the same answer: these are archetypes shaped by shared human experience. Ayiana Viviana 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.

See photos from the debut show →