Look at me #10 (Illustrated Spells) is part of a series of black on black paintings by Alisa Sikelianos-Carter. These works require the viewer to come in close to the surface in order to perceive the subtle variations in tone and hue in the composition. The series relates to the overarching narrative that connects all of Sikelianos-Carter’s works, which illuminates a fictional realm outside of time, in which “future-sent deities” inhabit a cosmically bountiful world that celebrates and pays homage to Black ancestral majesty, power, and aesthetics.

Among the deities that inhabit Sikelianos-Carter’s world are Afronauts—spirit entities that speak in spells, and inhabit the undersea realm of the Middle Passage, through which millions of enslaved Africans were transported by force on slave ships, often being hurled, or hurling themselves overboard as an act of resistance, along the way.

The title of this series, Look at me, relates to a personal experience Sikelianos-Carter realties about a White teacher who commented about how they never really looked closely at the faces of Black students long enough to notice the variation in skin color. Throughout her entire narrative, but especially through this series, Sikelianos-Carter speaks concretely to how the phenomena of looking relates to the phenomena of empathy.

Says Sikelianos-Carter, “Portraits are surrogates for intimacy.”