ARTIST STATEMENT

My photo-based work is an evolving conversation on self-perception, exploring the unearthing of subconscious impulses and revealing their expressions. These images belong to a series titled: Liminality: Self-reflection from the space in-between, a body of work I originally created for my thesis exhibition at the Academy of Art, where I earned my MFA in 2009.

 

In retrospect this series is my reckoning with being assigned female at birth and rigidly socialized as such, though I could not have told you that in 2009. I grew up in a rural California village in the 1980s and '90s. I understood my feral body in the expansive seaside pine forest where I roamed free. How that body fit within my social circumstances was more confusing. The messages I received about gender and sexuality were firmly entrenched in binary and compulsory heterosexuality, respectively. I was not aware of the existence of trans people, perhaps with the exception of highly stigmatized depictions in media like Jerry Springer, until I got to college at UC Santa Cruz, a school I am still very grateful to my younger self for choosing. There I found queer and trans friends and came out as queer, but it took quite a few more years until I could come out to even myself as a trans person.

 

In these images I play and interact with different selves, enacting characters I never fully identified with through self-portraiture. I think and move intuitively according to the emotions brought up in response to that environment, in that current moment, knowing that it will never be replicated. For me, this work conjures themes of vulnerability, the feminine, transitory states, psyche, dreams, death and rebirth. The variation in the solidity of my physical form references transitional states. The double layered fabric, sheer over opaque, lends an ethereal quality as the image shifts in and out of focus, obscuring and then revealing its detail.