In this abridged body of work, j. nyla ink mcneill presents mixed media—from paintings and photographs to a single day's face paint—that prioritizes lived moments over lasting objects. Living in a city where Black and Native infants and adults face disproportionately high rates of premature death¹, and belonging to low life expectancy categories in LA County², ink celebrates life through ephemeral art. Original works sit alongside cross-cultural traditions and historical references, illuminating mortality, instability, queerness, and the will to endure.

At the center of the work are three commitments: pushing aging phones beyond their perceived limits, moving from the flippancy of the selfie toward the staying power of self-portraiture, and creating beyond the hyper-fleeting, image-and-popularity-driven algorithmic logic of social media.

Honoring artists who came before them, ink's makeup art often carry history. They reproduce works or practices rooted in queer, Black, and Brown art, holidays, and protest, shaped by the spirit of clowning and drag. Face paint is worn without performance—not as spectacle, but as an invitation to conversation.

Color, in all their pieces, convey thousands of words of resistance. Informed by the city in which they live, rainbows are fractal, architectural, everywhere.

Whatever form the pieces take, identity is not the overt subject. Instead, it shapes how the work comes into being as visual and cultural auto-/ethnography. What remains is not an object, but a series of timestamps: moments of deepened collective and self-understanding amid social erasure,