Transitions: Art Study and Self-portraiture
Transitions (Work in Progress)
Transitions is a living study in self-portraiture, built in real time.
I work across collage, acrylic, ink, graphite, charcoal, pastel, and text, bringing in paper fragments, photo transfers, fabric, stitching, and encountered materials. I am drawn to what can be torn, shattered, scraped, dissolved, and rejoined. The work insists on this. Breaking and reassembling is not just a method, it is how I come to understand becoming.
At the center of this work is my own gender transition.
I move from masculine to feminine presentation, while also moving through shifting senses of self. Insecurity, recognition, doubt, desire, and moments of real appreciation for my own beauty all surface in the work. These pieces hold how I see myself, and how that seeing changes in relationship with the world.
The body of work also holds how I am seen.
How the world meets me, loves me, misreads me, resists me.
How I am invited into tenderness, and how I am pushed toward distortion.
How I am sometimes framed as a victim, or cast as something to fear.
The work refuses those limits.
I am not fixed there.
Transitions is a living study of self portraiture that turns becoming into art in real time, where the particular opens to the universal and we all find ourselves on the way.
What begins as transition expands into transitions. The singular opens. The work makes room. We see the hundreds of transitions in which we are caught in the middle.
A shared field of people moving through joy and loss as we become who we are.
Yes, you. Yes, me. Yes, all of us.
Those who recognize themselves here, and those who do not.
Those who stayed, those who left, those who protected, those who looked away.
And those who are still gathering their pieces, every last one, and choosing to sit with them.
There is a kind of bravery here the is not about being self-assured, but showing up for yourself and refusing to trade any part of yourself away to bring comfort to anyone else. It is not polished. It is closer to a stubborn, imperfect. Saving myself in real time from the limits and norms that try to define what I am allowed to be.
The paintings hold this movement. Layers are removed and added. Colors shift. Edges meet and separate. An image loses itself and finds another form. The work does not resolve. It learns how to live again.
This series grows through study and exposure. Through wide reading, sustained looking, and public reflection. Through materials that allow the body of the work to change as it unfolds. The particular continues to open toward the universal, not by flattening difference, but by staying with it.
Transitions is being built in public, in community.
I am in ongoing study with Disabled, Black, Latinx, and Queer artists and thinkers, sharing reflections through the Dada Breach Blog, and creating preparatory works that shape what will become the final exhibition.
This is a work in progress.
The pieces shown here are not fixed. Titles may shift. Forms may change.
Nothing is settled yet.
Everything is still becoming.
