- 2D -
“WIP: Self-Portrait series”
July 20/20 - cont.
“I remembered at a young age fantasizing about the idea of “womanly” ideologies. I craved until starvation for even the slightest piece of these identifiers to rid me of my biological exterior. So I would turn to a mirror in hopes that I would get the slightest indicator of femininity but would be disappointed every time I saw “him”. I turned to art to liberate myself of this perception from building cardboard structures to hide my barbies, to composing sculptures that symbolized the struggle of systemic views on women, I secretly hid within the walls of each piece to reflect the reality of my internal struggle. Each piece inched me closer to my divide by slowly sowing the seed of self-acceptance and drove me into an academic journey within the arts. I was then able to fully realize this voice that has yelled through each medium that I have exercised.”
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“S-he/he-R series: Untitled” 2/30/22
This piece is a response to the amount of transphobic and trans erasure I have endured since I have started taking Estrogen in June 2020.
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I wanted to represent the trans flag in this illustration through the daily battle of being conformed to the systemic symbolism of gender and its relation to color. Each illustration shows the battle between acceptance through mannerisms in both the pose and the color. Exposing certain aspects of the body in relation with the color exemplifies the question that I would ask myself; “ Am I still constrained by the hands of the society. and if so, where do I land when I free myself of its grip.”
white stripe: represents non-gender conforming, them/they, in-transition or non-binary.
Pink: represents female identifying, she/her, feminine, or female presenting.
Blue: represents male identifying, he/him, masc, or male presenting.
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This piece conveys the usage of color through the relation of oppositions and the attention to what is defined as actuality. The light coming from left to right expresses the concept of outside looking in, where as the line work challenges the concept of my trans experience. The use of color expresses the emotion through the systemic symbolism that has been imprinted on each child before birth. In my case, the assigned trauma and burden I carried way before I was given the chance to become myself. The relation of distance scratches the concept of within reach but this medium can only capture that moment of anxiety.
Left: representing the emotion of danger, alarming, needing attention in contradiction to the figure gaze on the inner emotion/closed off figure
Right: representing the inner emotion, the figure within the shadows, the version of myself that is protected from within.
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This was my earliest illustration that was drawn with the intention of capturing a struggle I developed with my identity. The left figure represented the ignorance of refusing to look forward, where as the right figure represents the warmth that comes from accepting what is before you.
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“ When in blue,
I feel like a lie.
When in Pink,
I feel alive.”
“ The struggle of balancing both or allowing one to conquer the other will be my life long challenge. One can not exist without the other but one feels right and the other feels like a reminder.”
10/17/2020
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Dead Name Portrait 1/1/21
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Angel's introduction 1/1/21
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10/17/21
This piece symbolized the death of my assigned gender and the embrace of the truest forms of my gender. At the time I didn’t know what that meant but later translated it to the fluidity of my gender. The death of my masked masculinity, the birth of my femininity, and the embrace of the in-between.
