The Redacted Collection
A series of still-life drawings depicting the fragments leftover when a subject is forced to conceal their desire for gender fluidity.
This ongoing series is about slow, silent, stinging erasure.
After I came out as non-binary and trans, I recognized that as a child I had learned to disassociate from core aspects of my identity in order to evade transphobic criticism, harassment, and danger. I knew traditional self-portraiture would not sufficiently capturing this process of psychological fragmentation. I began building a visual language through the collection of objects. Each object selected for its functional purpose, symbolic meaning, and personal significance. I gathered ephemera that had been cut or pulled from my body in the years prior to my self-actualization. I recontextualized these fragments with other objects, imbuing them with new meaning. A plastic baggie stamped with a dripping “A” holds a lock of red hair, suspended by a silver pushpin. A partially burned underexposed Polaroid harkens to an improperly erased memory; the desire to capture a moment and to remember, and later the desire to forget. These objects, rendered with precise attention to detail, are queer looking: both recognizable and mysterious. They remind us that even objects, through their functional and symbolic meaning, change throughout time.
The following questions guide my artistic choices: What happens when a person must disappear a core aspect of their identity in order to survive? If evidence of this trauma existed, what would it look like? What fragments can be pieced together to make a whole?