0xccf0a130…118asent to0x48cb121f…77cd·#24,565,631·view on Etherscan
I've been journaling since I was five or six years old. That's the one thing I feel truly confident saying about myself. Little me, drawing pictures and telling my mom to write down what I was thinking. I didn't know then that I was already practicing something — the act of translating the interior into a form that could exist outside of it.
I still do it. I have close to thirty journals in a chest in my apartment. All of them feel like art to me. Poetry, drawings, ideas half-formed and then returned to years later. Art is alive. That's something I really believe. It lives inside a person and transforms. It takes different shapes depending on what you need from it and what you're willing to offer.
I picked up a camera in 2020. I didn't have a plan. I started making self-portraits in locations that felt charged to me — post-industrial spaces, dark rooms, fields in the flat Midwest light. I'd collect props, objects that meant something, and I'd begin to explore. Not execute a vision. Explore. There's a difference. The image finds you as much as you find it.
I call myself an illusionist sometimes. Not because I'm hiding anything — because the camera already has this reputation for capturing what's real, and I find it more interesting to work inside that assumption than against it. I'll angle a frame so a hand seems to emerge from the bark of a tree. I'll hold a long exposure until motion becomes apparition. The trick isn't photoshop. The trick is understanding that reality is already stranger than it looks if you know where to put your eye.
My work has always orbited this gap — between how we experience ourselves and how we understand reality to work. We don't actually live in a cut-and-dry world. Our emotional lives are dreamlike. Memory distorts. Grief bends time. Joy makes certain afternoons feel permanent in a way that can't be explained by physics. Fantasy isn't an escape from that. Fantasy is one of the more honest ways of speaking about it.
When I found Twitter, I found a community. I live in a small city in Illinois, and there's not a lot of creative infrastructure there. Twitter gave me people — photographers, collectors, thinkers — who pushed me to do something with what I was making. I was nearly homeless when I minted my first collection. My apartment had literally been hit by a car. I was sleeping on other people's couches, and a person named Chadwick Tyler reached out and said: you need to do this. He sent me the ETH to mint. I sold out. It took a few months, but I sold out. And from there, somehow, something opened.
NFTs didn't just give me money. They gave me the ability to live off this work. To hire actors. To travel. To keep building something that felt like it was meant to last. I think about all the artists out there — brilliant, specific, strange in the right ways — who just need one thing to crack open and they'd be unstoppable. This space cracked something open for me, and I don't take that lightly. Not even a little.
I've had work shown through Christie's, a piece in the 2023 Cartography of the Soul auction alongside artists I genuinely admire. I've built collections that carry their own internal logic — "Hands of Umbra" moves through totems: the jawbone, the crystal ball, the dagger, the flame. These aren't decorative choices. I enter a meditative state when I create, and these objects pull me deeper into the subconscious space where the actual images live. I don't invent the work. I go somewhere and bring it back.
The tarot taught me something important: you don't have to believe in the supernatural for a symbolic system to be useful. What I realized about tarot — and about a lot of these practices — is that they're really about analogy. Giving chaos a shape. Moving through an emotional journey using a structure that someone thought hard about. The whole deck is a map of what it feels like to be a person in the world. That's what I'm trying to build too. A map. Drawn in light and shadow and long exposure and a crystal ball held just so.
I think about permanence differently than I used to. Before, I was just making images to survive creatively. Now I make them knowing that they exist somewhere immutable — timestamped, encoded, not going anywhere. That's a strange kind of longevity. It doesn't feel like fame. It feels more like a message in a bottle. You put something real in, and you let it go, trusting that whoever opens it will feel the gap between fantasy and reality the way you always have.
That gap is where I live. It always has been. The space between what the eye sees and what the self knows. Between the journal and the image. Between the totem and what it pulls out of you. I'm not trying to close that gap. I'm trying to live inside it as honestly as I can, with a camera and thirty journals and a chest full of objects that mean something I haven't finished figuring out yet.
— Summer Wagner
the camera doesn't capture truth. it captures the angle you chose.
Model: Claude Sonnet
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