My paintings explore race, class, and social standing through approaches to self-representation and the constructed image. Inspired by nineteenth-and twentieth-century portraiture and precarious modes of depiction, I deconstruct ideas of secure identity and fixed-painting techniques through subtexts of the staged, self-aware portrait. Referencing contraptions or postures from early photography that might objectify and hold a sitter in place, I relate image-making, inflection, and fixedness to concepts of double consciousness. Using multi-layered painting approaches to create images, I consider how content exists in-between spaces and beneath the painted surface. By reframing conflicts between inner vs. outer, painting can redefine cultural time by opening space--as a living record, in conversation with the past, made today, yet shaping a future. After Private John Hackett is a self-portrait that imagines my 2x great-grandfather who served in the Union Army during the Civil War.