This set feels more intimate, interior, and psychologically charged.
Faces are obscured, touched, transformed, multiplied, or held just beyond recognition.
The body remains present, yet identity keeps shifting at the edges.
These works gather around concealment, emergence, and metamorphosis, offering the viewer a series of thresholds rather than fixed arrivals.
Three figures stand in quiet formation while a pale current passes across their eyes, turning stillness into a shared condition. A clustered body turns within dark rings, holding stillness and motion in the same ritual frame. A figure covers its face while other faces branch outward, turning concealment into a strange kind of proliferation. A doubled figure turns in opposite directions while a hair-like veil passes over the eyes, giving concealment the shape of division. A figure lowers the head while many hands gather around it, turning pressure into a charged form of attention. A many-voiced figure opens into water and air, its repeated faces and gestures giving the scene the force of a living procession. Three figures hold a quiet formation while pale currents pass between them, turning separation into relation. A tightly formed group moves through a whirlpool of water, its shared momentum giving the scene the force of coordinated emergence. Five figures gather in a quiet circle, their lowered faces and stillness giving the water the feel of a threshold. A central figure rises within circling water while looped floral rings turn the scene into a calm act of elevation. A clustered figure settles into blue water while serpent-like strands rise from the head, giving stillness the charge of transformation. A radiant figure opens within a ring of surf, its gathered heads giving the water the force of a living crown.
Selected stills from the gallery may become Studio Editions. See the Catalog for access details, or send a note to request one.
Filed under: The Congregation of Selves
Explore more: Home • Archive • Guide • Rights Makari • Stomari • Mabst • Panoma Video • Audio • Gallery • Catalog
Creative practice. Art lives here.
Share Kirenya
These image studies emerged near a question I was already exploring elsewhere: what lives inside insecurity besides fear?
The figures in these works appear doubled, gathered, obscured, repeated, or held at the edge of recognition, as if the self were less singular than it first appears.
Across the studies, identity moves through relation, ritual, concealment, and return.
I’m interested in what happens when inward tension becomes visible form, and when selfhood appears less as a fixed portrait than as a shifting assembly.
https://www.yes.kirenya.com/t/the-congregation-of-selves