Altar for My Ego
Installation / Sculpture / Performance Residue
Ernest G. Welch School of Art & Design Gallery, Atlanta, Georgia, United States

Altar for My Ego is a shrine to the artist’s eleven-year-old self, a time when institutionalization, psychic rupture, and a new kind of self-awareness began to take hold. The work reaches back toward that moment, creating a point of contact between who the artist was and who they’ve become. Here, the ego moves beyond ideas of vanity and becomes something essential, a structure the self builds in order to make it through.

Within Three Tries: The Beginning, the altar feels like both a place of remembrance and a point of transition. It holds space for a younger self and the weight of that experience, where grief, recognition, and care come together. At the same time, it anchors the larger installation, linking each element to both the Stations of the Cross and Freud’s psychosexual stages. This piece draws on Freud’s idea of the ego as the part of the psyche that moves between inner desire and the outside world. It holds the tension between what is deeply felt and what can actually be expressed.

During The Beginning performance, the artist kneels in front of the altar and removes their leather jacket, placing it down as if setting aside a layer of protection. The gesture is quiet, an act of care for the younger self who didn’t yet have the language to understand what was happening. In that moment, the body becomes a kind of bridge, carrying memory and reaching across time.

The offering plate from the altar appears again later in Three Tries: The Resurrection, this time holding the artist’s hair, ink, and a needle. It returns as a familiar object, but carries a different weight. The work doesn’t end in one place, instead continuing as part of an ongoing process of revisiting, holding, and reshaping trauma.

At its core, Altar for My Ego understands the self as something shaped through rupture, but sustained through recognition. Survival here is not only psychological, but something lived and carried in the body. The ego becomes the part of the psyche that holds things together. It mediates between inner desire and the demands of the outside world. It is not just a concept, but a necessary structure, one that allows the self to endure, adapt, and keep going.

Photography by Getsay.