exhibit was probably ten years ago when some individuals that i know and care deeply about had the onset of some severe mental illness as i didn't know anything about it and in trying to support those those individuals i started to seek out you know what has what happened to an individual that might have schizophrenia or bipolar illness the onset is late teenage early adult years and what i found was there are no really positive stories no information about how prevalent these illnesses are and what i wanted to do was create a body of work that would give hope and to more understanding about what these almost as are the implications are that we all have these symptoms but it's all about different degrees so the four major symptoms are depression and anxiety and i think we can all i mania and psychosis the more difficult ones but we do all experience those with different amounts what i was looking to do was find people who had the more chronic symptoms and how they recovered and give hope through portraits of individuals and the people who supported them through their their life and so that they had recovery on the wall you'll see ninety nine portraits thirty three with schizophrenia thirty through bipolar and thirty three people who love them very broad and diverse collection and the selection of individuals that are in the ninety nine faces project follows the two thousand and ten cultural ethnic diversity that was recorded so that when anyone walks into this gallery to see this exhibit they can identify someone that looks like them so that it's to try and not say these are other people and should be pushed aside because they're all of us so we're all in this i've made through the use of paintings the research more accessible to anybody who walks in so i think you can look at my paintings get that out sense of what the research is about in probably sixty seconds so guards are actually skin cells that show a difference in the mitochondria individuals who suffer from these illnesses and it's different so the message in that is this is not just in someone's head it's a systemic illness and we don't have any methods of treating schizophrenia in its in its full systemic onset to someone's body same with bipolar illness then there's a sculpture of the d n a strand so that's twenty three dollars pairs of chromosomes and that can appeal to anybody even if you're not looking to learn about mental illness but the d n a strand is the instructions to create you as you are the whole reason we're all different why your face is different from mine your height is different from mine our eye color is different our fingerprint is different is that the instructions have  twenty five thousand genes and they're all different between all of us that's why there isn't a single person on the planet that's the same and my message in that if it he drills down into the mental illness situation is no one's brain is the same so we're trying to fit in apartments wise people into other groups when the understanding should be that we all think differently i'm trying to talk about the uniqueness of an individual without the without a diagnos i think i'm i'm very curious and i am always looking to take the value of science and put it into my art like behind me is a painting that i did when i was curious about what the population of the united states look like so this painting is eight hundred and fifty squares and i match them to the franklin around eight hundred and fifty people according to the u s census data this is the wondered how many people in a in a room you know would be experiencing sometimes to the point that they were diagnosed you know with an illness and so there's two sculptures in the exhibit one is the d n a sculpture which chromosome is done to scale all twenty three dollars pairs so the largest one is eighty five dollars inches long because in our body it's a five micro micrometers long and then the smallest one is seventeen inches and so took me six months with a work force of twenty five individuals and we all learned where the genes were and where the proteins are in the histones and we know asses and all the stuff that is isn't so that was to convey how complex we are as individuals the nd sculpture i made is to also address sort of the fact that we all suffer with symptoms so the base of the sculpture is it tells us that through history we have always been interested in a person's emotional state and what makes them who they are on top of the sculpture is a new way that we look at things and every single piece of th sculpture has an organic form so it so there's nothing with a straight edge the bottom is completely straight edge is circles on triangles which is what it was he is the top of the sculpture is organically cut and i use four colors to indicate  the symptoms and i use the volume of color for the volume of the surface of the material to be the same as it is indicated by and i have manged the national institute of mental health so the prevalence is based on color but not one single part of the color is static so it looks like it's flowing in the implication is that we all have these things but they are fluid states mental illnesses fluid states somebody who even has the worst amounts of psychosis is not always psychotic so there are moments of clarity so in the sculpture this parts of the sculpture there are completely clear and then the light filters down onto the previous space so that you it almost looks like it's watery and fluid the hardest part actually was the beginning of the discussion in putting it here at the museum of science we felt like it needed to move out of sort of this like desire for empathy and you know people are f so we didn't want to approach it like a cause even though underlying the agenda is to sort of break down stigma but to put it in the science context i also know that the way that stigma is broken down is usually when a person meets an individual whether that be a racial situation or you know something you've been afraid of before and you come face to face and you meet someone that usually helps break down  know we hasn't paid about mental illness because it's been stigmatized but the reality is we should be getting a mental health check up as easily as we get a physical checkup because it's going to happen to you sometime in your life i