Fixed – an art collection
!Please note! – the following contains mild nudity
This is a collection I completed while I was thinking a lot about gender and gender presentation, and how or where we draw the lines of what it means to be a ‘man’ or a ‘woman’. I am someone who sees gender as a language – a project we are shaping the meaning of as a culture and a community. That process of understanding ourselves, and the context in which we live our lives can either be creative and enriching, or it can be violent and restrictive. What does it mean when we say ‘gender is a social construct’? I think many people wrongly assume it must mean gener is made up, and therefore not real. But lots of things that are specific to and created by humans are very real and deeply meaningful. This set of illustrations is meant to capture my own feelings about the fraught history our western culture has had with this process of finding meaning within the experience of gender. Rather than an experience of curiosity, exploration, and mutual understanding, the experience of gender has been paternalistic and restrictive, for trans and cis people alike. We are all measured and then told what to be, if not by our parents, then certainly by our culture. This collection explores how that experience feels.
Another note – some of these sets are incomplete, and don’t have an undressed counterpart. I archive all of my projects once I finish them and I may have forgotten to keep the original files on my computer after I finished formatting some of the pieces for this post. Maybe I’ll dig them up at some point, or maybe the lost pieces add to the overall feel of the collection. 😀
