Lisa goes to the sky

In 2018 I was declared dead for a couple of seconds. The title Lisa Goes to the Sky is literal: I went up, briefly, and came back to a body that had to be rebuilt. I lost more than three liters of blood, and my face — the one surface every system uses to certify that I am me — was completely deformed.

During recovery I began documenting the process, with a sarcasm that was part of the survival. I sat in passport booths, the machines built to verify identity, and let them photograph a face still under construction. In the studio, serigraphy became a kind of skin graft: ink forced through a screen, tone by tone, the way my face was rebuilt layer by layer. Glass, mirrors, and metal structures repeat the plates surgeons placed inside my skull; an x-ray becomes an intermission rather than a diagnosis.

Eventually the work left the wall. Residual Care, a chaise longue in surgical steel and patchwork cowhide, carries the same logic to the scale of the body: a place to lie down and recover, stitched from skin and metal. Nothing is corrected; everything is incorporated.

These works are my interpretation of that process — an argument that identification and identity are not the same thing — and a thank-you note to everyone involved in bringing me back.