Unapologetic Faces.
The Cost of Being Seen
The origin.
I'm an author and an empath, and recovery is a lifelong path for me. For years I've taken in the stories of people fighting to survive their own circumstances.
My fight with substance abuse and depression is still active. Every day. When stress hits or the lows creep in, the old escape routes show up again. I create from the trenches, next to everyone else doing the hard daily work of choosing to move forward.
Sharing what I was going through made me a safe harbor for others. I met people paralyzed by their trauma, and I met others who were fiercely unapologetic about who they were. As different as they were, they shared one struggle, the exhausting fight to be heard and seen.
Every face tells a story before we even say a word.
At first, I saw the people struggling around me as having cracked faces. I read the cracks as broken.
As I grew and worked through my own healing, I saw them differently. The cracks were vulnerability and honesty, and they were authentic. Their resilience was beautiful, even when they couldn't see it.
The visual language.
Unapologetic Faces came from a need to release the heavy energy I'd taken in from other people. I couldn't save everyone, but I refused to leave people behind without a sense of hope.
I use digital mixed media to map what we all go through as people.
The cracks
Vulnerability, and the real scars of what we've lived through.
White
Purity, and the raw reality of being human.
Black
The darkness and the heavy weight of the trauma we carry.
Gold
Gold carries two meanings. It's the healing and the breakthrough, what our resilience is worth. It's also greed, the hunger for more, and how hard it can be to feel grateful for where we are right now.
Why archetypes.
There's a cost to being seen in a world this judgmental. Out of respect for the privacy of the people who impacted me, I don't use their faces.
I bring those encounters together into Figurative Archetypes. Each one is an emotional avatar, built from many people instead of one.
Everything we go through.
I believe every mistake and every trauma we live through is necessary for us to evolve. We're all moving toward the end of our time here. The goal is to get there knowing we took our struggles and made the best of them.
Real representation lives at the core of the human experience, deeper than sexual orientation or the color of our skin. Strip away the outside and, at the level of the spirit, we're all the same. I made these archetypes so anyone, from any background, can look into these faces and finally feel seen.
View the works →