City of Self .Mixed Media Self-Portrait Collage. This piece began as a dream—one I carried since childhood—of living inside a city that felt like a universe of possibility. Before I ever walked the streets of D.C., New York, or Madrid, I was building them in my imagination: glowing windows, impossible skylines, and the electric hum of creative life. This collage is the first time I translated that inner landscape into a physical form. The materials come from the fragments that shaped me. There are clippings from the New York Times real estate section I used to circle as a teenager, imagining the homes and horizons I would one day inhabit. Sections of my old art-history study guides appear throughout the piece—pages softened by years of learning the movements, painters, and cities that shaped my artistic consciousness. Even the graffiti-bubble lettering comes from the restless, expressive sketchbooks I kept during long nights when my imagination stretched far beyond the suburbs I lived in. One of the most personal details is the art-history cutout of a woman sitting with her cat—a figure I originally used to study Ferdinand Léger. In this collage, she becomes a symbolic presence: a woman daydreaming, drifting in and out of her own interior world, subtly influenced by the rhythms and vibrations of the imagined city surrounding her. She mirrors me—absorbing, dreaming, studying, and preparing to step into a larger world. Warhol’s commercial pulse flickers in the colors; Magritte’s surreal atmospheres open windows into the impossible; Tamara de Lempicka’s clean geometric modernism sharpens the skyline. These influences aren’t borrowed—they are woven into my artistic DNA. At the surface, another lineage appears: a Pollock-inspired drip technique. I used it intentionally, not as chaos, but as coded emotion. The drips form the word “love,” embedded across the piece like a hidden ritual. It symbolizes my lifelong devotion to the art world—the museums that felt like sanctuaries, the books that became scripture, the study guides that sculpted my vision, and the cities that existed first as fantasies before becoming lived reality. Layered together, these materials create a portrait not of my face, but of my becoming. This collage reveals the architecture of my longing, the boldness of my ambition, and the lineage of artists who subconsciously guided me. It is a map of the places that called to me long before I arrived—proof that the city I dreamed of was never imaginary, but a future self waiting for me to walk into her.
