How much is the person in the window?

This painting started with a headline: 23andMe sold to the highest bidder.

I don’t know why it hit me so hard. Maybe because I’d always thought of it as something intimate -- blood, family, the story of who we are. Suddenly it was just... data. A portfolio asset. Another thing to be packaged and sold. And I felt something in me ache.

That moment became the inspiration for this painting.

At the center is a symbol that started as a question mark, because that’s what this is about… the deep, human desire to understand ourselves. Over time it became a bidding paddle, then a dollar sign, and finally something that resembles the infinity symbol. That loop, to me, reflects how identity is caught in this endless cycle of being reduced, priced, and extracted.

I drew the barcode by hand. It’s not perfect. It bleeds from a fingerprint -- my way of merging biology with infrastructure. What used to be a body, a person, a lineage… reduced to a pattern that a machine can read. A receipt.

I think what unsettled me most wasn’t the headline itself, but how normal it felt.
Of course it would be sold.
Of course our data is monetized.
Of course our curiosity -- about ourselves, our ancestry —becomes part of someone else’s portfolio.

I know I’m not innocent in any of this. 

I live inside the same system. 

I use the tools. I optimize. I benefit. 

Sometimes I even thrive in it… Maybe even complicit?

And yet, I don’t believe this is how it should be.
I don’t think identity, thought, or art should have to be productive to be worth something.
I don’t think everything we make or feel or wonder about should be up for sale.

I’ve been thinking a lot about this lately, especially in the way people always ask me, whenever I talk about something I enjoy doing - “So… do you make money from that?”

I get it. I really do. Not everyone has the luxury to keep things purely personal. I’m aware that even being able to reflect like this is a privilege. But I think that’s why I feel the responsibility to name it. To pause. To create at least one small space where the cycle stops.

That’s what this painting is.

It’s a mourning.
A meditation.
A refusal.

A small echo of something Vandana Shiva speaks to in her work -- the idea that life, whether seed or selfhood, should not be reduced to a commodity. That knowledge and identity belong to us all, not in someone’s portfolio. That when we extract rather than relate, we sever the very web that makes us human.

This (unfinished) painting is my attempt to re-weave that thread.
To say that not everything sacred has to be useful.
Not everything true should be monetized.

A reminder that when we seek knowledge through systems built for profit, we might not find understanding. We might just find ownership.

And what we lose could be far more than we imagined.

Love, Vx