What if the self is not one fixed identity, but a spectrum of emotions, memories, and unseen layers moving through us at once?
Prismatic Reverie explores identity as something fluid rather than singular. The figure becomes a layered psychological portrait, shaped by shifting color, fragmentation, and overlapping forms that suggest the many versions of ourselves that can exist simultaneously.
The prismatic elements reflect the way experience changes perception. Memory, emotion, desire, grief, intuition, and imagination do not exist separately; they overlap, altering how we understand ourselves and how we are seen by others. Like light passing through a prism, one source can separate into many colors without losing its origin.
Rather than presenting fragmentation as damage, the work considers multiplicity as part of being human. Contradictory feelings can coexist. Past and present selves can occupy the same internal space. Parts of identity can disappear, return, or transform as experience reshapes us.
There is a dreamlike quality to the composition, suggesting the private mental spaces we enter when the boundaries between memory and imagination begin to soften. Prismatic Reverie exists within that suspended state—where identity becomes less defined by what can be easily named and more by the layers that are felt but rarely visible.
At its center, the work asks us to consider whether becoming whole requires reducing ourselves to one clear version, or whether wholeness can instead mean accepting the full spectrum of what we carry.
Created from Lisa Bayer’s original photography, hand-built digital collage, and layered painterly composition, the work is produced on archival canvas and individually finished with hand-painted oil and acrylic details, giving each piece a distinct physical surface and presence.
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