Third Face Theory is the conceptual foundation of my artistic practice: a framework through which I explore identity, contradiction, and the spaces where the self resists definition. Across collage, photography, painting, and text, this theory shapes how I work: privileging what is fragmented, unfinished, and opaque. This brief essay was first published in my zine of the same name in April 2025.
Third Face Theory
There is no single face, no final self, no fixed arrival.
Third Face Theory begins in the refusal of binaries: the rejection of the split between public and private, between what is seen and what is known. The first face is the one we inherit: a face shaped by bloodlines, by skin, by imposed narratives. The second is the one we perform, crafted in response to the gaze, strategic, survivalist, often burdened by expectation. But the third face is not about inheritance or performance. It is something more elusive. A fugitive self that emerges in the spaces in between, built through contradiction, opacity, and interiority.
The third face resists coherence. It cannot be flattened into representation or made legible by systems designed to categorize. It does not seek visibility on the terms that have historically distorted Black life. Instead, it operates in shadow, in multiplicity, in rhythm. It is not worn like a mask, nor displayed like a portrait. It is glimpsed. Felt. Traced in ritual, silence, memory, fracture. It is not the face the world asks for, it’s the one that speaks back, not always in language, but in presence.
This theory is not a solution to identity, but a way of holding it differently. It affirms the right to remain untranslatable, to exist without offering the whole story. The third face values what has been left out, covered up, or unspoken. It treats fragmentation not as a loss, but as a form. It honors the self as layered, partial, and always in motion. In this way, Third Face Theory is both philosophy and practice: a method of working, seeing, and being that privileges process over product, refusal over resolution.
To live in the third face is to accept that you may never be fully seen, and to choose that anyway. It is to build yourself from pieces not meant to fit, and to let that dissonance become a kind of freedom. It is the face that does not perform, does not comply, does not end. It is what grows in the absence of certainty. It is the architecture of a self made whole by never being whole. It is a theory born not to define identity, but to defend the space in which identity remains unfinished.
