My name is Charlize McCarter, my work is rooted in the complexity of identity and its formation through memory, culture, and lived experience. This body of work represents the first phase of an ongoing exploration. It serves as an ode to the values I have inherited from my Greek heritage. I come from a family deeply tied to Greek traditions with some of my earliest memories bound especially to my Yiayia, Greek for grandmother. I remember the chaos of preparing feasts for Greek holidays, the presence of Orthodox icons in her home, her love for art, and the quiet strength she and my family carried while guiding me through moments of fear associated with my diabetes. These memories mark my earliest encounters with Greek culture, experienced both as a source of protection and inheritance, even as I remained distant from particular religious traditions having never been baptized into the Orthodox Church. For this showcase, I have combined photography, painting, design, and AI to construct a personal mythology. The photographs and book on show are an ode to family and heritage where I document family events, dinners, and personal items, and mix these to tell the story of our relationship. My paintings, Byzantine-inspired and based on the icons gifted to me by my Yiayia, reflect themes of devotion and preservation. My quadriptych was developed through conceptual planning, symbolic research, and AI-assisted image generation. I refined its imagery through Photoshop compositing and color correction, and they trace stages of my life as a Greek myth, with accompanying booklets expanding on the symbolic and mythological references. Together, these works invite reflection on how tradition, memory, and myth can be reinterpreted, and how identity emerges not as something fixed, but as something continually inherited, questioned, and ultimately reshaped into one’s own.