Reality Is Only a Suggestion

We Bray Muhammad, known artistically as “Straight to Voicemail,” is a Philadelphia born, Orlando based multimedia artist whose practice explores emotion, surrealism, transformation, Black expression, and the often unpredictable relationship between imagination and reality. 

Muhammad’s creative practice began outside the traditional fine art pipeline. Working first as a makeup artist with an emphasis on costume, character, and horror, she developed an early fascination with altering appearances, creating identities, and using the human form as a canvas. She later carried that instinct for transformation into painting, developing her practice independently as a self taught artist.

Her solo exhibition, REMedy, expands that practice into a dreamlike exploration of sleep, emotion, memory, and healing. The title draws simultaneously from REM, or rapid eye movement sleep, and “remedy,” a treatment or means of relief. During REM sleep, vivid dreaming coincides with heightened brain activity and processes associated with memory and emotion. At the opposite extreme, prolonged sleep deprivation can distort perception and, in severe cases, contribute to hallucinations. Muhammad uses the space between these two states as the conceptual playground for REMedy, imagining what happens when dreams, memories, fears, humor, nostalgia, and waking reality are permitted to collide.

Rather than presenting healing as quiet or clinical, REMedy embraces its contradictions. The exhibition moves freely between playfulness and discomfort, fantasy and truth, humor and vulnerability. Familiar imagery can become strange. Unsettling ideas can become beautiful. Deeply felt experiences can arrive disguised in color, absurdity, or humor. Muhammad’s background in transformative makeup remains present in this approach, not necessarily through subject matter, but through an enduring interest in what can happen when something recognizable is pushed beyond its expected form.

Living with a rare physical disability has also informed Muhammad’s relationship with creativity. Art has become both a means of expression and a space in which difficult emotions can be transformed rather than concealed. Her practice resists the expectation that deeply personal work must be solemn to be meaningful. Instead, Muhammad creates room for joy, fear, grief, desire, anxiety, nostalgia, humor, and cultural identity to occupy the same visual world.

From her beginnings in Philadelphia to her evolving practice in Orlando, Muhammad has developed an artistic language grounded in experimentation rather than convention. REMedy represents an invitation into that language. It is an exhibition where the subconscious is given permission to speak, the bizarre becomes beautiful, and art functions less as an answer than as a place to process what cannot always be explained.

As Muhammad describes the exhibition: “REMedy isn’t just an art show. It’s my dreams, my healing, and my truth on canvas. It’s a love letter to those who find beauty in the bizarre, to the dreamers, the weirdos, and the culture.”

With REMedy, Muhammad invites audiences not simply to look at the work, but to enter her REM cycle, where the surreal meets the real, every emotion is allowed into the room, and creativity becomes its own kind of medicine.

No prescription necessary.