Enduring the Psychical
“Enduring the Psychical”. iPhone 5S, Apple Photos, Prequel. j. nyla ink mcneill. 2020.
In works such as Enduring the Psychical, 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 period of intense meditation, psychedelic integration, experimentation, and personal reckoning. The images document interior transformation as much as physical space with home as a site of exploration. The body’s partial disappearance evokes states of transition, longing, and psychological expansion.
their practice treats the self-portrait not as fixed representation, but as an evolving site of inquiry. Blank avatars, silhouetted figures, reflections, obscured corporeality recur throughout their works as stand-ins for fragmented identity, dissociation, ancestral memory, and future selfhood. Influenced by Black expressive traditions and autoethnographic methods, the photographs examine what it means to construct personhood amid surveillance state, alienation, collapse.
Light and shadow operate simultaneously as material and metaphor. Blackness is approached not only as racial identity, but as color, atmosphere, poetics, absence, and cosmology. Across the work, photography becomes a record of psychic movement: less interested in documentation alone than in capturing moments where consciousness and embodiment begin to reorganize themselves.
