Identity
Notification
Complicated Truths
Identity
Artist Statement: Then and Now
When I first created Identity, the portrait was sharp, recognizable, and immediate. Constructed from hundreds of pills arranged into my own face, it confronted the viewer with an uncomfortable question: How much of our identity is shaped by what we consume, and how much by society’s judgment of it?
I created this piece as the final work in a trilogy following my HIV diagnosis. It was deeply personal, but it was never just about HIV. It was about every person whose life is defined—or judged—by the medications they take. Whether prescribed legally to survive or misused in an attempt to cope, pills have become symbols that society often weaponizes. We praise some medications while condemning others, forgetting that behind every prescription bottle is a human being simply trying to make it through another day.
I intended this portrait to do something most artwork is never allowed to do.
I wanted it to age.
I knew the pills would not remain unchanged. Their coatings would discolor, their chemistry would react to time, air, and light. As I continued living, so would the portrait. More than a decade later, that transformation has become the work itself.
The medications have cracked, faded, oxidized, and slowly surrendered to time. My face is no longer defined by perfect circles of manufactured color. Instead, it has become softer, fractured, and more complex. The portrait has lost clarity while gaining truth.
Living with HIV has taught me that medication is not simply treatment—it is routine, discipline, hope, and survival. For millions of people living with HIV, diabetes, cancer, heart disease, mental illness, chronic pain, or addiction recovery, medication is woven into daily life. It becomes part of your morning, your evening, your travel plans, your finances, your fears, and your future. Eventually, it becomes part of your identity, whether you want it to or not.
As these pills have aged, they have become a metaphor for all of us. Our bodies change. Our faces change. Our diagnoses change. Our understanding of ourselves changes. What once appeared permanent is revealed to be temporary, yet somehow even more beautiful because of its impermanence.
Perhaps the greatest gift this artwork has given me is one I never anticipated.
Most artists never witness the lives their work continues to live after it leaves the studio. Once a piece is collected, its story often becomes invisible to its creator. I have been given the extraordinary privilege of seeing Identity more than a decade later because someone chose not only to live with it, but to preserve its natural evolution.
For that, I am profoundly grateful.
Their care allowed this work to continue becoming what I always hoped it would be—not a frozen moment in time, but a living record of it. They gave me the rare opportunity to witness an inanimate object growing older alongside me, documenting the same passage of time that has shaped my own life.
Identity has not deteriorated.
It has lived.
And in living, it reminds me that identity is never fixed. It is rewritten by illness, medicine, resilience, prejudice, love, survival, and time. Every day we change. Every day we become someone slightly different than we were before.
This portrait simply had the courage to let that transformation remain visible.
Nature is Corrupt
