COLLAGE: VIOLET

Violet (2025) takes its text and title from the song by L.S. Dunes. The central illustration references an image of the band's lead singer Anthony Green. The line "You are the only star" struck me as prescient, uniting the masculine, mythic rockstar with the feminine "diva" archetype, exemplified in the images of women from fashion magazines. I chose editorials from Vogue and Harper's Bazaar, including ads for Alexander McQueen and photographs of Grace Jones. I also used images from motorycle publication Road Racing World, as well as kid's magazines.

This piece was included in the group show Echoes of Tomorrow at Touchstone Gallery from February 13 to 17.

SERIES: ANGELS OF GLAMOUR

Angels of Glamour is a series of collages created across the summer of 2024. I pasted images to the inside of cardboard food packages, depicting the kaleidoscope of lives and experiences bound up in the supply chains that deliver our goods. The modern globalized economy has allowed for greater cultural exchange than ever possible before, but at the same time, obscures the labor and resources expended to bring packages of granola bars to our door.

Angels of Glamour I

Angels of Glamour II

Angels of Glamour III

Angels of Glamour IV

Angels of Glamour V

COLLAGE: IT'S IN OUR BLOOD

In September of 2023, my work was featured in Existence as Protest, a group exhibition centered around trans and non-binary voices, at Rhizome DC.

The collages were featured in BMore Art, in an article by Ian Kibria. Kibria says:

Kibria's analysis mirrors my artist's statement, which was also included as wall text for the piece. Here it is in full.

I chose the phrase, "it's in our blood" for its multiple meanings, meant to reflect the infinite realities of transgender identity, including my own. I feel that my non-binary identity can best be described by double (or triple) entendres, never one thing or another.

The phrase refers to the constancy of transness, which has always existed in human history. It refers to the rebellion of transness, the pleasure and beauty of transness, and the sacred rights of transgender and gender-nonconforming people throughout cultures. It refers to the violence faced by trans people across the world and throughout time, "blood" spilled and passed down. I used pages from contemporary beauty and fashion magazines both as representatives of the delicate, opulent and gorgeous nature of transness, but also to highlight bourgeois cisgender ideals of masculinity and femininity. Fashion magazines are often a young person’s first exposure to the glamour and disguise of makeup and luxury clothing, their own sorts of drag that costume the buyer, reader or wearer as someone of high class. They are pure symbology and artifice, existing only to convey one’s sophistication.

In my own experience, I feel connected to the stories told through luxury goods as both reflections of how it felt to be closeted, costumed by femininity, and how it feels to be non-binary, able to trade masks and disguises whenever I feel. I am disgusted by the luxury market and the greed of the wealthy; I also admire the craftsmanship of the products and appreciate that the labor invested into them is respected and paid its true value. Gender is not confined to what is advertised in Vogue and can be purchased from a catalogue. A trans future could not be told through a magazine, but a scrapbook of histories. Transness should not be advertised, but archived, remixed, reinterpreted and reborn, as all transness is rebirth.