I have recently become interested in getting to know people who are, for one reason or another, unknowable. Women who have long since passed, fluctuating in and out of existence through the artifacts that they have left behind, reach out through the windows of crumbling photographs. In creating 16 Ladies, I was attempting to represent 2 women from an old photograph in the various ways in which I could imagine them. I was trying desperately to fish bits of character out of the corners of their facial expressions. Dissatisfied with their flat representation, each face was scrubbed out to make room for ambiguity, leaving space for their mystery, autonomy, and sexuality. In the process of creating this drawing, I learned things about these 2 women, and learned that these things were lies.