The Yeiser Art Center Members + Sponsors Exhibition has always felt to me like a room where private meditations are briefly made public. Objects that once lived undone on studio tables are placed under light and asked to withstand an audience. It is a generous risk.
This year, I offered Cul-de-Sac.
Two mirrors, one labeled “Before,” the other “After,” are placed opposite each other on a rotating base, all resting upon a horizontal circular mirror. Look into “Before,” and “After” quietly appears behind it on the mirrored surface below. Look into “After,” and “Before” surfaces in the same way. The reflections do not converse; they coexist. The binary collapses. Sequence folds inward. What was promised as a straight road becomes a cul-de-sac.
Writing the words with lipstick required careful calibration. Too hard, and it snapped; too soft, and it disappeared. Even then, perfection was impossible — the medium was never designed for this canvas. To leave a mark without fracture was all that could be hoped for. Writing backwards and upside down, trusting the mirror to complete the message, became an act of surrender, a negotiation with both the material and the reflection.
At the center, the melted lipstick candle stands as a subtle call back to last year’s Expiration Dates. There, lipstick slouched in surrender to linear time. Here, it is time itself — Kairos, a dense, pregnant moment in which transformation unfolds.
I began this piece believing I was re-addressing my discomfort with the conventional “before and after” photograph in makeup culture. It has always felt narratively thin to me — almost dishonest. Not a diptych, but a triptych: before, after, before again. The makeup is removed. The face returns. But the work soon revealed a deeper tension: transformation that is profoundly felt but cannot be witnessed by others.
Some transformations feel like light breaking through bone — internal shifts so radical that they alter perception, posture, breath. Elation courses through the body, yet the face remains unchanged. And there are transformations born of trauma, loss, or generational secrets — deep alterations that must remain private, that cannot be publicly acknowledged. The mirrors insist nothing has changed. The reflection is stable. And yet, irrevocably, something has shifted inside.
Cul-de-Sac holds these invisible currents. Lean into “Before” and glimpse “After.” Lean into “After” and glimpse “Before.” The experience asks you to witness recurrence rather than arrival, to feel the weight of transformation that leaves no outward trace.
As a makeup artist, I live inside this tension daily. Beauty is often framed as visible change, yet the most meaningful transformations I witness are relational and internal. They occur in presence, in perception, in the subtle recalibration of how someone inhabits their own face. Art, like beauty, is not merely object or outcome — it is encounter.
If you would like to stand within that loop — to watch the words hold one another, to feel the tension of fracture, fragrance, and invisible transformation — I invite you to the Members + Sponsors Exhibition reception on Saturday, March 7th from 4pm–7pm at the Yeiser Art Center.