Ariana Page Russell creates images that explore the skin as a document of experience, using her own hypersensitive flesh to illustrate the ways we expose, express, adorn and articulate ourselves. She has dermatographia, a condition in which one’s skin temporarily welts when lightly scratched. Her work depicts and plays with the beauty created by these welts, which mark the body and the mind, as iconography for space, time, and what it means to be human. Russell is a Los Angeles based artist whose work has been exhibited in New York, Seattle, Los Angeles, Dublin, New Dehli, Toronto, Australia, Bolivia and Venezuela, amongst other places. Her work has appeared in Art in America, the Huffington Post, Wired, The Atlantic, VISION Magazine: China, The Indian Express, Women's Health Magazine, and the monograph ‘Dressing’ published by Decode Books. She was featured on ABC News 20/20 and was invited to give a TEDx Talk at University of North Carolina in 2016. She received her MFA from the University of Washington, Seattle in 2005. The work featured here is from her Interior Optics series. Interior Optics consists of photographic images which simulate scientific optical instruments that can detect and read layers under the skin. These images show an internal topography—the many depths just under the surface that reflect and refract light like a prism—which reveal a hidden, mysterious, often extraterrestrial landscape. Skin becomes an instrument to detect and transmit light from within. To achieve these effects, she manipulates the tone, saturation and hue of hyper-detailed images of her skin with dermatographia drawings on it. These adjustments emphasize the surface detail in such a way that skin becomes a surprising and colorful terrain. We see hair, welts, follicles, moles, dermis, epidermis, and glands, all at once.