In this abridged body of work, j. nyla ink mcneill presents mixed media—from paintings, to photos, to a day’s worth of face paint—that prioritize lived moments over lasting objects. Often, the artist uses their own face as surface, capturing themself or painting directly onto themself so that works exists briefly in space before being washed away or archived, reflecting a minimalist approach that resists physical accumulation. Central to them all is: challenging the limits of aging iPhones, moving from the flippancy of selfie to the celebration of a self-portrait, and creating beyond the unstable nature of an image-and-popularity-driven social media landscape.

Honoring artists before them, painted images often reproduce work or practices by queer artists, and are shaped by the visual languages of clowning and drag, where makeup carries history, transformation, and communication. At times, the face paint is worn without performance as a statement that invites conversation rather than spectacle.

In any form the pieces take, identity is not the overt subject, but essential to how the work comes into being in as auto-ethnography. What remains is not an object, but markers of self-understanding and experiences between people and time.