I Am

I Am by Kailum Graves reads as a joint project comprised of two linked art-objects; the first is a video collage "comprised of several hundred ‘I am’ statements sampled from BBC World News articles"; the second reads as an autobiographical timeline in the form of a large-scale infographic. "I wrote a timeline of my entire existence," Graves explains, that "contained my deepest Core (my soul, my Being, my consciousness, my unconsciousness, my me-ness) [ . . . ] This project is an attempt to be me. It is me refusing to hide. It is a self-reflective metaphysical question that I couldn’t answer until recently—what does it feel like ‘to exist’?" -- from the Artist's Statement, New River Journal