The image studies that became The Congregation of Selves emerged from the same inner terrain as an essay I published a few months ago: Arrogance, Wearing Insecurity’s Clothes.
That essay circled a tension I have come to recognize as deeply generative, even when it feels uncomfortable to name. It began with what I understood as insecurity: the slowness, the hesitation, the split between conviction and doubt, the sense that the work matters and the simultaneous question of whether its meaning may remain visible only to me. Beneath that sat another recognition, stranger and sharper: insecurity can carry its own hidden grandeur. It can contain the presumption that my inner frequency is so singular, so difficult to meet, that its solitude becomes evidence of its uniqueness.
That thought stayed with me.
It stayed not only because it was uncomfortable, though it was. It stayed because it revealed something true about the theater of self-consciousness. I can doubt myself in a way that remains wholly preoccupied with myself. I can feel uncertain and still place myself at the center of the stage, lit from above, singular in sensitivity. I wanted to understand its structure before I moved to correct it.
Looking back, I think these image studies took up that inquiry in another language.
They keep returning to multiplied selves, obscured faces, repeated gestures, clustered bodies, shared currents, unfinished identities. The figure rarely appears as a simple singular presence. It arrives echoed, doubled, gathered, crowned, concealed, or fused with others. Sometimes it seems ceremonial. Sometimes it seems psychologically dense. Sometimes it feels almost excessive in its own self-presentation. At times it even becomes faintly funny to me, which now feels important. The humor does not diminish the work. It reveals another aspect of it. Intensity has its own theatricality. Self-consciousness, when given form, can become both haunting and a little absurd.
That may be part of why these images shifted in my own perception over time. I first experienced some of them as eerie, even slightly unsettling. Then, slowly, they became funny to me. Not trivial. More like overfull in a way that made their emotional logic visible. Their strangeness began to read less as threat and more as exaggeration, ritual, stylization, performance. I could see them as carrying psychic pressure and also as knowing, somehow, how much pressure a self can generate around its own image.
In that sense, the studies feel closely linked to the essay. The essay asks what happens when insecurity begins to wear the shape of arrogance, or when doubt and grandeur become difficult to separate. The images respond by refusing the fantasy of a clean, singular self altogether. They keep offering bodies that are collective, relational, repeated, and in motion. They seem to suggest that what feels like singularity may already be a gathering. What feels like private intensity may already be a chorus. The self that imagines itself alone in its frequency may, in fact, be crowded with witnesses, echoes, masks, returns, and other versions of itself.
I think that is part of what led me toward the phrase The Congregation of Selves. It feels larger than a title and closer to an organizing intuition. What draws me to the word congregation is that it carries assembly, witness, ritual, relation, and presence. It suggests that selfhood may be less like an isolated portrait and more like a gathering of forms that appear together, influence one another, overlap, and occasionally speak at once. That feels close to what these works are doing. They do not present identity as fixed. They present it as accumulated, shifting, partially concealed, and continuously arriving.
That essay gave me one way of thinking through that terrain. It could name the tension directly. It could ask whether insecurity was disguising arrogance, whether singularity was becoming performance, whether fear of indifference was entangled with an inflated sense of my own significance. The image studies seem less interested in argument. They hold the same material symbolically. They turn it into repeated faces, veils, rings, water, thresholds, clustered figures, unfinished recognitions. Where the essay uses language to examine the mind in motion, the images let the body become the site where contradiction gathers.
The studies companion the essay. They stay near the same questions while moving in a different register. They make room for ambiguity, visual excess, and feeling that exceeds explanation. The essay carried the fear of being the only one resonating in a particular frequency. The images answer with figures that remain in relation. Even when the figure appears solitary, it is surrounded, echoed, extended, touched, multiplied, or held in a current larger than itself.
Perhaps that is one reason I eventually shared them.
For a while, they felt like something I might keep near me rather than release. Then the day arrived when they seemed ready to leave the studio. Or perhaps I was ready to let them carry what they had been carrying all along. A field of relation. A record of inner multiplicity. A congregation.
I’ll leave it here for now. What do you think?
— Makari
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