Embodiment Revised, 24” x 18”, oil and acrylic on paper and canvas, 2025

These two works interrogate the instability of representation by staging the body as both a site of figuration and a field of material rupture. The seated figure is of a woman, but the face and chest collapse into painterly accretions of opaque, geological textures. In this gesture, the conventions of portraiture are destabilized, reorienting the body toward a condition of fragmentation rather than wholeness.

The insertion of layered, mineral-like surfaces interrupts the continuity of skin and facial recognition, producing a visual language of erosion, stratification, and repair. Her folded hands suggest repose, but their calmness is unsettled by the instability of the head and torso where subjectivity traditionally resides. Here, those loci of identity are obscured, dispersed into sedimentary abstraction.

Positioned within my related exploration of “art-beings,” these works emphasize how subjectivity can be read as a layered archive rather than a singular presence. By collapsing figural representation with material intrusions, the paintings underscore the tension between embodiment and disintegration, presence and absence, the human and the geological.

The title Disarticulated Subjectivity reflects the way this figure resists coherence. The body is present, yet fractured at the very sites where identity is usually anchored, in the chest and the face. In this disruption, subjectivity is not erased but unsettled, dispersed into layers of material and memory, leaving the figure suspended in a liminal psychological space.

Embodiment Revised suggests a body that is present but unsettled, caught in the act of being rewritten. Recognizable in gesture yet fractured at the chest and face, the figure reveals embodiment as provisional, unstable, and open to disruption.