Self-portrait as Someone Unseen is not a self-portrait in the traditional sense of the word. Hagler worked from the image of Nathaniel, a perpetrator of a mass shooting in Los Angeles, choosing to make a self-portrait that wasn’t in his own likeness. Instead he continued his method for creating self-portraits which merges a sense of personal artistic feeling with the image of someone undesirable, as a kind of gesture toward living in the skin of those who are feared or ostracised. In Hagler’s mind this is a strategy for staying close to the subject and understanding it.

The Sound depicts Jordan Anchondo, a 25-year-old woman who was shot dead in an El Paso Walmart last year. When the shooting began, Jordan shielded her son, falling on top of him when she was shot. Her husband also died in the shooting, leaving behind an orphan, a baby alive only through the power of love and sacrifice.

The Time Given V.I is the companion piece to The Sound. It deals with the same event in El Paso in 2019, when a white supremacist targeting Latinos and immigrants shot and killed 20 people in a Walmart. The Time Given V.I and The Sound went on to function as studies for the larger Time Given and Trace of the Mother IV respectively.

Like Roswell Boy, the painting Nathaniel is the product of the artist reacting to events that took place in familiar locations. Nathaniel was the perpetrator of a mass shooting that took place in Los Angeles, where Hagler used to live.