In I Am Me, an ordinary encounter between two women becomes a contemplation on the irreducible strangeness of first-person existence. The figures lean toward one another in conversation, their gestures suggesting familiarity and connection. Yet while one remains contained within the language of figurative painting (a reference to Corot), the other is physically interrupted as her face and torso give way to accumulations of crystal, mineral, threads, and other materials that project beyond the painted surface.

The work begins with a deceptively simple proposition: I am me. Repeated and considered closely, the statement opens onto a more difficult question. Each person encounters the world from within a particular body and consciousness. We can know another person intimately, exchange memories and ideas, and recognize their gestures and expressions, but we can never occupy the first-person experience from which they perceive the world. Here, conversation becomes an attempt to cross that distance, even as the material rupture of one figure makes its limits visible.

The mineralized body does not offer a hidden self waiting to be uncovered. Instead, the excavation produces crystalline structures, geological fragments, and constructed surfaces that occupy the place where conventional representation breaks down. The work relates to others in the series in which biological, geological, technological, and experiential histories accumulate without resolving into a singular explanation of the self. The recognizable hands remain particularly significant as they hold, gesture, and reach outward as points of contact between an inaccessible interior and a shared world.

The painting extends my ongoing investigation of fragmented and hybrid bodies, while departing from the solitary figures that recur throughout much of the surrounding work. The presence of two subjects shifts the question from what might exist within a single body to what occurs when one unknowable interior encounters another. Neither figure can fully enter the experience of the other, yet they continue to lean toward one another.

By allowing actual material to intrude upon painted illusion, I Am Me also insists upon the process of the artwork itself. Brushwork, irregular surfaces, embedded minerals, and evidence of fabrication resist the seamlessness of an image. The distinction between representation and object remains deliberately unresolved. The figure appears at once painted, excavated, constructed, and transformed.

What emerges is less a portrait of two particular individuals than an existential portrait of being among others—the paradox of inhabiting a consciousness that feels entirely one's own while recognizing that every person encountered possesses an interior world that can never be fully entered. The work locates intimacy not in overcoming that separation, but in the persistent human impulse to reach across it.