About Janel Reliford

About Me

I am an interdisciplinary digital artist whose work explores how societies shape people internally—and how that internal shaping quietly echoes back into the world.

At the center of my practice is a simple intention:
I want to create art that grows inside you.

I don’t create art to assign meaning or instruct interpretation. I work through resonance. My process begins with observation—political, interpersonal, psychological—and moves inward. What emerges is not a message to be agreed with, but a mirror to be encountered. Each piece invites viewers to notice what it stirs, resists, or reveals inside them.

My work is introspective by nature. It reflects something internal to me at the moment of its creation, but it does not belong to me once it is seen. Meaning is created by the viewer, not the artist. A piece may reflect who someone is now, who they were, or who they have yet to become. Some viewers immediately recognize themselves within the work; others do not. Both responses are valid. The only challenge I offer is this: to look closely enough to know which is happening.

My collections vary widely in form, aesthetic, and medium. I do not operate within a single visual style, and I am not interested in narrowing my work to one. What connects my practice is not appearance, but inquiry: how power, systems, culture, and collective behavior shape individual identity—often invisibly, often asymmetrically.

Much of my work is created through intuitive discovery rather than predetermined concept. Meaning is often recognized after the work exists, not before. A piece may begin as an experiment with symmetry, motion, or form and later reveal its social or psychological implications. This approach allows the work to remain open—capable of holding multiple truths at once, or none at all.

Several of my collections explore reflection and duality: order and chaos, agency and use, visibility and erasure. Others imagine alternative social architectures—worlds where identity is fluid, perception is altered, or appearance no longer signals hierarchy. Across all of them, the human interior remains central.

My practice exists at the intersection of digital painting, process-based creation, recording, and narrative. Some works include visible evolution—erasure, revision, time passing—allowing the act of making to remain present in the final piece. Others hide information deliberately, rewarding sustained attention rather than instant consumption.

All of my work is minted on the blockchain before it is presented to the public. The mint establishes the authentic, original intellectual property of the piece. The NFT is considered the original work.

Every piece is also made available as a physical print through my print-on-demand store. If a work is available as a print, it means the NFT has not yet been purchased and remains available to collectors. The moment an NFT is purchased, I permanently remove that artwork from print production. In this way, purchasing the NFT is not only acquiring the original—it is an act that closes the edition. The collector is honored by my commitment to stop printing the work entirely.

Collectors may own prints of the piece they hold as an NFT, but no new prints are produced once the original is acquired. Over time, prints may exist in the world in varying quantities, but the act of collecting the NFT ends that chapter. The value of the NFT is directly tied to the life of the work itself.

I view art as a record of the landscape in which it was made. Mine documents the internal effects of living within modern systems—without prescribing solutions, identities, or conclusions. The work does not resolve tension; it holds it.

This site functions as an ongoing archive of that practice. It is not a complete inventory, nor a static statement. Like the work itself, it reflects where I am now.

0 Comments:

Post a Comment

Designed by OddThemes | Artistry by Janel