emmett ramstad
This work is a reflection on bodies in process. Like a scar healing, there are new
layers of meaning perpetually created within our skin and I am exploring this process of becoming.
In the “Good Ones” Series, I displayed a series of surgical remains from a dear
friend’s top surgery on hands embroidered in satin pillows, along with printed, handmade
paper scars. In this Series I was exploring what it feels like to cherish signs of change
within a loved one, the way parents may keep their children’s teeth.
In the “Transcape” Series, I had just come back from a Trans Day of Remembrance
event in San Francisco, and was thinking about how scars can be a unifier and how they
form a landscape of scars.
In the many permutations of the “Becoming” Series, and this selection in particular,
I was thinking about how unfixed bodies truly are, in the face of tremendously fixed
identity politics. “Other” explores the many signifiers in the title Other. “Crossing”
is a reflection on boyhood for adult transfolks, and the t-shirt detail from the “Becoming”
series was part of a reflection on the ways clothing operates as skin.
eddie gesso
The language of abstraction and minimalism play a strong role within my visual
vocabulary and emerge as methodologies for picturing the queer/trans body. It
is my belief that in the literal representation of queer/trans embodiment we risk
buttressing our cultural notions of "male" and "female" as stable categories.
Working outside the framework of figurative imagery enables me to evoke a body that
exists in opposition to the culturally iterated body. I view this as my body, and as such,
it is changing, performing, and failing every day. This is my search for a new language.
cobi moules
My interests lie in the way in which we use and examine the body as a way to define
and classify people. Within sex we are put into a two category system which is fabricated
arbitrarily according to signifying marks of the body. Why do we limit ourselves to this
binary system of thinking and why do we use the body as the basis for such thinking?
Bodies are very complex systems and yet we break them down and look at them as two very
simple and opposing things and define people accordingly. I am looking at the body and
the way we examine
it in such a way and question this thinking and practice that we so naturally use.
melsen carlsen
In the beginning of this whole process, I became so concerned with stripping away the
mask of my female body that I ended up constructing another, equally obscuring mask with
testosterone. Though still seen by most strangers as a young man, I now inhabit a body place
that is much less clearly defined and much more genuine.
Transitioning was a large part of my inspiration for creating the large-format staged
photographs. I wanted to tap into my psychological quandaries and try to communicate
them in a visual language that rendered them true to my experience, yet accessible to
viewers without first-hand knowledge of body dysphoria.
The round photographs are portraits I took with a pinhole camera from inside my vagina.
As I let my guard down and relinquished much of the control I would typically have had
as the photographer, my subject and I were able to almost switch roles of power in the
situation, with me being in the more vulnerable position. I want these photographs to t
ranslate that sense of vulnerability to you, the viewer. What would it feel like for a
person to look directly at your genitals –
what would it feel like if your genitals didn't seem to fit with the rest of your body?