Brainstorm
Swaddled
“Swaddled” ended up being a sack of potatoes swaddled in the blanket pictured below. Originally I had imagined labels such as “Lady’s Man” and “Daddy’s Girl” printed onto the blanket to represent the form that the gender binary takes on during infancy. The existence of labels referring to female and male children was meant to show that both have exited within me since birth. I am the sack of potatoes. I chose potatoes because choosing a doll would also come with the politics of the color of doll I chose. The doll would inevitably have a race (black, white, hispanic, asian, etc) and would therefore be less universal. Simply choosing a black doll, since I’m black, might have then been taken as a political statement that I wasn’t sure I wanted to focus on with this piece. I also thought that potatoes would speak to the absurdity that surrounds gendering babies or anyone for that matter. Calling a baby a lady’s man because it giggles around girls is stupid and weird and presumptuous and I wanted to show that.
The first graphic pictured below is a composite of different gendered things that we might impose on children and infants. Butterflies, flowers and race cars and super heroes are all present. I also included a few things that might not be so clear cut in society regarding gender, such as soccer, female super heroes and a bird. This graphic didn’t feel right to me so I played with color (pinks, blues and purples) and blending modes in photoshop and added some scribbles and ended up with the final graphic pictured below. I think this felt better because it was messier. It wasn’t discordant or negative but it was chaotic and unintelligible, which has been my experience.
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- initial negative for printing
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- final graphic for printing
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- final blanket
Resolution
“Resolution” was about the process of realizing that I don’t have to label myself in order to be myself. I’ve been confused as to whether I could call myself a boy or a girl. whether I could call myself trans or gender fluid or cis or agender. I didn’t know how to label myself or what pronouns to go by. I still don’t but I decided that at the end of the day what matters most to me is not what I’m called by others or what I call myself. It matters that I exist as I am and as I want to be, because at the end of the day people are very aware of both my masculinity and my femininity and my friends and family appreciate both of those aspects of me the way I want them to. So this was the affirmation that I began to tell myself whenever I got stressed about labels and pronouns: “It doesn’t matter what I am called, it matters what I am”
I captured this process of realization by writing the phrase with oil pastel on paper, crumpling the paper, un-crumpling the paper, painting over it with black acrylic paint and then gently washing the paint off. The process of doing this was really important to me. The black pastel felt strong because of the color but soft because of the material. This duality is also present in my voice as I say these words to myself. Soft because it took me a while to realize this thing and because I’m still dubious of its truth, but strong, because even if it isn’t true it needs to exist whole heartedly within me in order for me to decide whether that’s how I want to live or not. Crumpling, un-crumpling and painting over the paper felt like an inner push and pull which was finally resolved by washing off the paint and uncovering this potential truth about my life.
I present this process to the viewer in the stages of my conviction. In the first stage, there is no truth only disfigurement and rubbish. In the second the my words are barely visible underneath the acryclic. Slowly the words become legible but the paper is never fully white and pristine, because I’m still figuring this out.
Model
Other 3 Pieces
My last 3 pieces (which we were not required to render outside of the scale model above) included a diptych and an installation. The diptych would be two prints. One would be a cyanotype of all the clothes I’ve associated with my masculine presentation to the world (my boxer briefs, my baggy jeans, my sneakers, my belt, etc). This would be a traditional cyanotype so it’d be blue. The other would be pink and would feature all of the clothes I’ve associated with feminine presentation over the course of my life (bras, panties, skinny jeans, dresses, skirts, etc) the installation piece would be boxes drawn on the floor with all the different pronouns people go by around America. I want them to be flat on the ground so that it doesn’t have to feel liek a big deal for someone to step in and out of them. The word other would be written in the center of the room, above the crib which would hold “Swaddled”. It would imply an understood rather than represented box, bigger than all the others. This suggests that despite the numerous amounts of labels available for our society, there is still a huge percentage of people who don’t feel accurately described by any of them, me being one.
