Jas, Doubled, is part of Devan Shimoyama’s series of “stuttered portraits.” The series began while Shimoyama was on an extended trip to Paris. He experienced an optic migraine caused by a detached retina. Rather than succumb to surgery, Shimoyama opted to wait for the symptoms to subside on their own. During that time, he began making distorted portraits that conveyed the visual echoes he was perceiving when looking through both eyes. “It had the effect of seeing something from a warped or different perspective, two times over,” Shimoyama says. “There’s a little bit of an angle shift.” Unlike Shimnoyama’s self portraits and portraits of friends, Jas, the woman in this portrait, is a hybrid character; a fictitious creation, not representing anyone in particular. “I think about archetypes of individuals,” Shimoyama says. “She is however inspired a lot from my friend who is trans, fem and Black, and fair-skinned, and often wears her hair in these long twists that are these copper tone colors. A lot of the features are based on her, and her reconstructing her ideas of beauty based on image, spotting herself in the mirror and being surprised to see a woman.”