Enduring the Psychical
Enduring the Psychical
j. nyla ink mcneill
2020
Digital photograph shot on iPhone 5S
Compresed copy
Courtesy of artist: Originally published on patreon.com/c/inkmcneill.
In works like Enduring the Psychical (both a photograph and essay), j. nyla ink mcneill uses photography, shadow, and digital self-portraiture to explore spiritual becoming, psychic survival, and the unstable process of self-recognition in hypermodern life.
Created during the social isolation of 2020, the work emerged from a lengthy period of meditation, integration, and personal reckoning. The image document home as a site of exploration.
their practice treats the self-portrait not as fixed representation, but as an evolving site of inquiry. Blank avatars and silhouette obscur corporeality as a recurring subject throughout their works as a representation of what it feels like to navigate cultural erasure in a flattened, digital landscape.
Influenced by Black expressive traditions and autoethnographic writing methods, the photograph examines what it means to construct personhood amid a surveillance state.
Light and shadow operate simultaneously as material and metaphor. Blackness is approached not only as identity, but as color and cosmology. Across their works, photos becomes a record of psychic growth.
