Artist Statement

Disgusting, dangerous, depraved, demonic, delusional, deviant, and full of darkness.

This is a collection of words used to describe transgender bodies. The body as a political battleground is an idea with a rich history within feminist scholarship, but what does it mean to live that in real time?  According to Eli Clare “…my queerness resides in my body” and there is a “high price” to pay for being “irrevocably different”.  One of the high prices of being transgender is to endure an unending stream of hateful rhetoric from politicians, religious leaders, and influencers.  I am transgender and I have affirmed my nonbinary gender identity by altering (mutilating?) my body surgically.  As a transgender person who is particularly visibly because of how I have modified my body, the simple act of existing in public is a political act.  I want to take the next step: Instead of resting in involuntary activism, I want to engage with intention (and reclaim my agency) using visual art.  Despite a background in conceptual thinking (I have BFA from SAIC), until recently my artwork has been purely aesthetic.  The process of trans self-actualization was the push I needed to move beyond aesthetics into ideas.

Conceptually, my aim is to use self portraits and portraits of others to juxtapose the reality of the transgender body with the words directed against it. I hope to encourage the viewer to confront their “oscillating fears” (Butler) and assumptions about gender. The ideas and images I am exploring in my work are polarizing, and because of that want my work to be approachable, seductive, and easily understandable. This is why I work in a representational and realist style.

While a picture is worth a thousand words, words have the power of clarity and conciseness, and this is the impulse behind adding text to my work.  The words in my work are drawn from researching the history of gender, and anti-LGBT quotes taken from popular media.  Superimposing these words on my drawings references the historical practice of propaganda that combines text with images to coerce.  To further underscore this, the calligraphic hand I use for the text is based on Fraktur, a 500 year old blackletter typeface that was heavily used in early Nazi propaganda. My intention for adding text is not to create propaganda, or give these hateful words more power, but rather to draw parallels and be a contrary voice.

The inclusion of these phrases on my drawings may seem a bit on the nose, but it is a deliberate choice.  We live in the age of social media and short attention spans - I might have only a few seconds to communicate a message to a casual viewer and I wish to make full use of that time.  I also appreciate that western hierarchical structures of knowledge are “systems of control” (Foucault) and reflect the racist and classist underpinnings of society. I want to push against this by leaning into intellectual accessibility and refusing to hide my ideas behind impenetrable walls of subtext and symbolism.