(self portrait) IDENTITY

I’ve never known what it means to feel at home in myself. If there’s a word I keep returning to, it’s misplaced. That sense of being out of sync has followed me since childhood, as if the world spoke a language where words held alternate meanings, a world where I was expected to perform without ever being given the script. An autism diagnosis late in life provided me with a lot of answers to a lifetime of feeling out of place, but it wasn’t a solution. It was just a new way of naming the fracture I’d always carried. A broken identity of who I truly was, and who the world expected/required me to be.

My identity doesn’t feel like a single story. It feels like pieces scattered on the floor, some sharp, some soft, none of them fitting together the way people expect them to. As a result, my body of work includes a multitude of mediums, topics, concepts, etc, because my identity has long chased after a sense of belonging, a feeling of home, a purpose. My self portrait work was initially born out of the need for a subject, but it was also a visual representative of the performing and masking my everyday life required. For a large portion of my life, I don’t believe I ever knew who I really was, and self portrait became my first option for self exploration, discovery, and later on, excavation.

Identity, as I’ve come to understand it, isn’t about clarity. It’s about contradiction. It’s about the stories we tell ourselves to make sense of a life that rarely makes sense. When I call myself misplaced, I don’t mean it only as loss. Misplacement has given me perspective. It allows me to see the cracks in the narratives we cling to, about beauty, about religion, about normalcy. My portraits may look broken or lonely to some, but they’re not. They’re whole in their brokenness, and maybe that’s the closest thing to an authentic self I’ll ever find. I after all, have had to re build myself so many times, there is now a lot of strength held in those repairs.

Limited edition prints available upon request.