Sophia and Jackson

Acrylic on Panel, 65 x 54 inches

The names Sophia and Jackson were the most popular girl’s and boy’s names in the United States at the time I made this drawing. I follow their parallel lives, both beginning on July 4, 1982. Their early milestones align, smiles, first words, imaginary friends, suggesting equal beginnings. Each milestone is shaped by randomness, by fragments of my own experience, and by childhood psychology, its markers and its anomalies. Soon their paths diverge. Sophia turns inward, emotional and unspoken. Jackson turns outward, analytical and increasingly dark. Their preferences, Sophia’s red ovals and Jackson’s blue triangles, signal a symbolic split. Both encounter moments of ineffable perception, “something so stunning.” Sophia holds it within. Jackson speaks it aloud. Sophia becomes small. Jackson becomes large. Power, scale, and identity shift. Symmetry begins to fracture.

The dates, July 5, 2018 for Jackson and July 5, 2022 for Sophia, mark their deaths, each one day after their shared birthday. This symmetry binds them in deep entanglement while also rupturing their once-parallel lives. Sophia’s death is explicit, shot by Jackson in her bed. Jackson’s is ambiguous, possibly self-inflicted or symbolic. Whether they are siblings, opposites, or two facets of a single self, the symmetry of their endings blurs victim and perpetrator and collapses identity, memory, and violence into a single moment.

The work reflects on how identity shifts, sometimes quietly, sometimes violently, beneath the surface of what appears to be symmetry.