My Body & Its Iterations

MY BODY AND ITS ITERATIONS // ARTIST STATEMENT

In spring of 2021, I received top surgery, a gender confirmation procedure similar to a double mastectomy. In late summer of that year, I began my residency at the Highpoint Center for Printmaking with the goal of creating a record of both my body-in-transition as it healed from this procedure and my being-in-transition as this confirmation established a new relationship between my body and my self. 

I chose to create this record through screenprinting because it is a medium in which the pressure needed to create a print comes from the same areas of the printer’s body that were most affected by my surgery: the chest, arm, and upper back muscles. As a transgender person who does not desire a linear female to male transition, I have been greatly influenced by the eminent theorist José Esteban Muñoz’s idea of Queerness as something “both here and not yet here,” a dawning glow that perpetually signals an expansion of the possible rather than the arrival of a fixed state. Throughout the course of this residency, I built upon these starting points in a variety of ways, united by two visual anchor points. Unmixed yellow felt like a tonal match for these concepts: gentle, bright, and assertive. When line was needed, I defaulted to graphite because it leaves strong marks while remaining mutable, workable, and soft. 

My investigations resulted in more than forty screenprints on paper depicting bodies in relation to an animate brightness. These prints, in turn, were translated into an animation. And then, because the projected animation felt dislocated from physical experience, I drew on the bodily memory of being propped on pillows after my surgery to create a space for groups of people to view the moving image together. As I worked, I considered the audience of Queer/Trans/Young/Future people who serve as my primary motivation for creating art and found that most of them exist outside of the spatial/temporal confines of the exhibition. This led me to create a zine which can circulate within my community long after the exhibition is closed. 

Ultimately, I created these pieces because I know both my Transness and my Queerness to be fundamental not just to my personal identity, but to my humanity. My body is the catalyst for this work, but the work is not a portrait of my personal body. Rather, it is an invitation for viewers to locate themselves in their own bodies, regardless of their own physical particulars. It is an entreatment to bask in what anarcha-queers call “now-time,” the restful, playful, and bittersweet practice of relishing the present moment with both our selves and others. It is my hope that these works depict and simulate that tender place which harbors hopes divorced from goals, delights in the unformed, and celebrates those things which are unfinished by their nature rather than through error.  So please: accompany the human body as a liminal creature which is yours, a gem of many shifting facets, before heading back into the world.