Dimensions: 40”H x 40”W x 1.5”D

Medium: Acrylic on gallery wrap canvas

Year: 2019

Additional: This painting was made with Black 3.0, the “blackest black acrylic paint in the world" which absorbs 99.6% of light across the visible, UV, and infrared spectrum. This paint was created by Stuart Semple and over 1000 artists after artist Anish Kapoor revealed in an interview that he had acquired exclusive rights to the world’s blackest black paint, Vantablack, a pigment developed in the UK for military purposes such as the painting of stealth jets. Black 3.0 is less than one percent darker than Vantablack and is available to anyone except Anish Kapoor.

This work is part of a series based on voicemail messages I started saving when I moved back to America, nearly a decade ago. Each painting is a visual representation of language used in the message: the abstracted imagery and lines correspond to a sound wave of this spoken audio. The title references this text - the core meaning of the message - and the number corresponds to the order of messages received.

After my phone was stolen while traveling in South America, I thought about the thief listening to my saved messages and how a person whom I have never met would know intimate details about my life and relationships. I realized my saved voicemails were fragments of my identity or deconstructed self portraits. Whether digital or tangible, I think what we save and why reveals part of our identity that might otherwise remain hidden.

Since the concept of this series is identity, I painted on mirrors to highlight the conceptual notion and literal reflection of the self. I intentionally worked with a limited and muted color palette to allude to the many gray areas in life and how things are “not always in black and white”. The initial square format of each work referred to how we view images on social media and the fragmented self-portraits we create online. But as the series (and my concept of it) expanded, I transitioned to include larger canvases.