Narratives Undone

When I am creating an image, I can never escape photographic 
considerations of gender and sexuality. I am a limp-wristed, 
gender-queer, freaky, fierce, faggot-tranny-queen. History’s lens has 
rendered me perverse, provocative, ornamental, illegal, glamorous, 
consumable, sexual, desexualized, a fantasy, a commodity, a parody, 
a product, a joke, a threat; my work aims to humanize these 
representations and simultaneously challenge their modes of 
misinterpretation.

Most often I am the photographer and the subject -- a queen doing 
it for herself, with self-awareness and agency, reinventing and 
reworking relationships of spectacle-spectator, domesticated-exoticized, 
dominator-subjugated. Situating relationships. Locating myself. 
Speaking with all of my voices.

As an effeminate four-year-old boy, I would descend into the depths of 
a musty cellar and dive into a cardboard chest of dress-up clothes. I 
would re-emerge swathed in sheer scarves and sequins, a dainty 
princess-fairy ready for her close-up. With exhilaration I’d thrust a 
Polaroid camera into my Mother’s hands to document the euphoric, albeit 
brief, moment to add to my snapshot collection. It is in this 
quintessence that my work exists.

My art provides a site to explore the territory of alienation, subversion, 
discovery; it is a place to construct myself. I revisit erased histories, 
perform and inhabit multiple roles and narratives, and document moments of, 
and in between, gender—scripting a narrative that is inherently 
self-reflexive as it is constructed, deconstructed and experienced.