It Was All Very Queer Artwork and Statements

Daniel Allyn Lee

Statement: I make paintings using my own collages as the source for my compositions. I utilize gestural line drawing, a limited pallete and embrace random chance. I deal with themes of masculinity, nature and relationships. I feel the elements in my paintings are like random thoughts in a winding conversation.

Website: https://www.instagram.com/danielallynlee/

Brandin Barón

Statement: Mirroring my past scenographic work in theater design, my compositions are “staged” through the process of layering my photographic and hand-rendered imagery with stock photography and digital textures. These are converted into photo-collage (the composite is printed onto multiple surfaces and then cut and reassembled with other tactile surfaces into a photo-collage). I utilize experimental printmaking techniques, especially in the play between different surface qualities of ink/paint/pigment. After the works are printed and or assembled, I apply a final layer of acrylic, gouache, oil wash and metallic ink through hand illustration or painting, ensuring that each individual photo-illustration or photo-collage is differentiated from the others in the limited series. 

Website: http://www.brandinbaron.com

Charlie Blake

Statement: I paint for many reasons, but one of them is simply so I can see myself and my community hanging up on a wall wrapped in that reverent glow paintings always seem to confer on their subjects. As a non-binary artist my work reflects my trans/queer experience of the world. I use two- and three-dimensional media to capture my lived queer world and I draw from many stylistic traditions to capture that experience. My abstract work explores the often complex relationship of trans people to our bodies, and my figurative work often depicts trans/queer bodies in queer/polyamorous relationships with one another.

Jackson Bullock

Statement: I'm inspired by the rural queer, using imagery from the everyday country, displaced and recontextualized into something ambiguous, beautiful, and peculiar.

Website:http://www.jacksonbullock.com

Kevin Carr

Statement: Through drawings laced with interlocking lines and lovingly pieced quilts I examine a history of queerness through a lens of abstraction and person identity. This way of working acknowledges joy and familiarity while maintaining questions of existence, privilege, and subjugation. By engaging these issues intimately through abstract systems, I am able to breakdown my own sense of queerness, looking for answers that may not exist.

Carefully, I establish a system for creating each work, only to let the accidental imperfections exist. Imperfections that only the most scrutinizing eye would catch - a wavy line, a misplaced color, or quilt squares that do not quite lineup. These blemishes, though small and inconspicuous, survive as gaps in my understanding, a rejoinder to endless questions, and a sense of humanity to cling to.

Tiélere Cheatem

Statement: This piece is part of a series I started a few years ago titled “La Beauté de Homme” (The Beauty of Man). My series La Beauté de Homme all started with the goal to showcase different emotions, moods through the male form. I wanted to break the stigma that men can’t express feelings of their own. That they too are beautifully sensitive and emotional beings. I want my audience to empathize with my work, to feel what I feel. In this piece the muses have taken on personas of the feminine perspective, giving them the names of strong women in history and mythology.

Website: https://therustyartist.com

Jacob Clayton

Statement: Words cannot adequately express what it’s like to go through life in the wrong body. The turbulence of confusion, desperation, fear, and isolation creates a sustained trauma from which I had found very little escape. But that all changed when I began to depict the fracture visually.

Gazing into the lens of my own life’s complexities, I’m documenting the double standards, hidden curricula, systematic micro-aggressions, and profoundly destructive groupthink about gender identity, expression, and expectation from every side.

In my mixed-media self portraits, I fuse my body with iconic imagery rooted in our collective consciousness. Through these images, I seek to better understand the truths about myself and the world. And to be understood.

Website: https://jacobclayton.com/

Alexander D’Agostino

Statement: I am an artist working with queer histories and images.My work considers the performative nature of witchcraft and spiritualism as tools for presenting queer history. I feed my brain queer culture and history and become “possessed” by feelings and stories I imagine when I make images.Currently, I am Utilizing cyanotype and solar-reactive vat-dyes to create “Queer Shrouds” in response to acquiring a collection of vintage gay erotica gifted by a neighbor who inherited her uncles antique store, and discovered his secret collection.
Making prints of this archive on fabric is a labor of love and alchemy. Cyanotype, and solar reactive dyes allow me to capture ghostly shadows of this queer treasure. In addition to the erotica, I am including images from my own works, along with images of 16th century witch-hunting manuscripts. When these witch-hunting manuscripts first began to circulate, people ate the up with fear and curiosity. The explicit and supernatural content of these witch-hunting books became spectacle and gossip, allowing people to hide secret desires and fantasies under the guise of study evidence to scrutinize and accuse.
The synthesis of these images is creating a living breathing project that allows me to present my experience with trying to invent and come to terms with my own sense queerness, and to share that publicly in hopes of resonating with others in search of stories and identities that might normally be invisible/erased/or hidden.

Website: http://www.alexanderdagostino.com

Perry Danis

Statement: Every human must inhabit a body, it is a truth that connects all of us. Our bodies are in a constant state of change. Every human must live with the delicacy and mystery of the biological systems that both allow us life and cause our mortality. Our bodies are also inexorably linked to our minds and identities. A visual representation of dysfunction in the body is symbolic of emotional and societal disturbance. In my artistic practice I often deal with issues of anxiety, anger, and wonder manifested through bodily imagery.

I’m in a constant state of material exploration, which helps to generate or inform many of my ideas. I’m interested materially in the marriage of the detritus of everyday life and traditional materials such as paint, plaster, clay, paper mâché and resin. My work often includes found objects from the trash or roadside, casts and hardware. The things we manufacture, use, and throw away have a life cycle like our own and I feel I can best speak to the nature of humanity by reimagining the discarded materials created by it.

I strive to create art that is simultaneously beautiful and nasty, seductive and threatening, precious and dirty. My work is an earnest exploration of a mortal existence in which the body is both celebrated and condemned.

Website: http://www.perrydanis.com

Mike Dowley

Statement: My artwork develops intuitively through drawn and painted layering processes. Texture, color, and atmosphere are important to me, as these sensory elements help locate the subjects of the work.

The pieces develop through observation of real places - houses, rooms, landscapes - and from imagined landscapes or 'spaces.' The later type of works are often found in daydreaming or in early or late hours of the day. I know a piece is finished when it feels separate and surprises.

Website: http://www.mikedowley.com

Kalven Duncan

Statement: Kalven’s work has consistently dealt with themes of identity and its performative element, but as of late, their studio practice has been more focused on world-building by creating spaces and narratives around everyday objects and settings. They want to relay the degree to which identity influences interactions with visual and material aspects of reality.

Website: kalvenduncan.com

Zoe Finkelstein

Statement: My art practice considers what it means to call a place home, and what it means to call ones own body “home.” The spaces in which we spend our time evolve into this larger entity of “home” after actions and patterns are repeated in this space, and I have recently been considering how the same applies to my experience learning to be comfortable within my own body and with myself as a whole.
For a long time, I did not view myself as 'queer enough' to be an active part of the LGBTQ+ community. I identify as pansexual and am attracted to people as a whole without a preference about gender, though it has never been a large part of my overall identity. I never really officially “came out” to people, I instead casually slip into conversations that I have had crushes on girls and nonbinary people. But it is a part of who I am, and I don’t want to shy away from that. It also does not need to be something I talk about all the time in order for it to be a part of who I am.

Website: https://zoefinkelstein.myportfolio.com/

Dominic Finocchio

Statement: The evocative possibilities of incongruity provide a source of endless combinations that eventually, after an often lengthy editing process, allow me to recognize an opportunity and a way to meet the needs of the image at hand. As I begin the process, my choices (figure, animal, landscape etc.) are arbitrary; the pictorial elements come and go (some return) until a resonance that I could not have foreseen occurs.

Website: http://www.dominicfinocchio.com

Jake Foster

Statement:Through my art practice, I hope to create conversations around queer desire and digital sex work through various modes of artmaking including performance, sculpture, drawing, and new media. My work investigates how webcam technologies are used to facilitate sexual intimacy.

The performance Sacrament for a Pandemic is based around a quote from Douglas Crimp in 1987: it is our promiscuity that will save us. In a refusal of respectability politics that sought to blame queer people for the HIV/AIDS pandemic, Crimp asserted that it was queer peoples intimate bonds made during sex which made collective organizing and radical care for one another possible. Repeating the quote, I ritually eat and drip a semen-like fluid over my body. The performance was staged on the erotic webcam site Chaturbate in December 2020, at the height of the global COVID-19 pandemic. Video documentation of the performance is presented on a deconstructed TV screen, foregrounding the material reality of digital sexual interactions.

Website: jakefosterart.com

Maxi Glamour

Statement: The Triptych of Glamour was created by Maxi Glamour during the pandemic, as a way to think about internal struggles they inflict upon themself. This surrealist mixed media piece on was created with makeup, rhinestones, water color, tempra, acrylic, and spray paint on three wood panels. Looking at the face of the portrait, Maxi incorporated a pour paint technique to give the painting an enchanting texture. This self portrait of a blue demon sparkles as you walk by with it’s trippy eyes and silent mouth representing the glamour in observing and staying silent.

Website: https://maxiglamour.com

Nick Hancock

Statement: I am a queer, HIV+ and undetectable sexual assault survivor and digital artist living with PTSD, depression, and anxiety in Chicago where I explore identity and portraiture in an effort to reconnect with my body and environment.

The burden of trauma from sexual violence as a queer individual has made me feel as if I cannot relate to my past nor connect to my present being. There?s a disconnection from my body, mind, and spirit that needs to be dissected in order to be whole again in my body.

I am always taking a step out of my body to check my environment even if it is with close loved ones; I am constantly looking over my should with uneasy breathing, but I promise you I will still engage while unnoticeably on autopilot. It isn’t always a burden to my body. My mind feels heavy, cold, and restricted as my heart beats alternating anger, fear, anger, fear.

Will I ever find Nick and learn to love and live in my body? Will you ever find and love Nick?

Website: https://www.instagram.com/nickhancockart/

Sean Hoisington

Statement: I invent a cinematic reality inhabited by characters reminiscent of the past, yet that exists in the present. A strong narrative with an ambiguous plot dominates my work. The story unfolds through multiple, digital images depicting the characters in conflict. Their personal melodramas or psychodramas may be centered around physical jeopardy or inner turmoil, to which they react with impulsivity or teeter on the cusp of a dramatic decision, coping with the fallout from previous actions, or fleeing the monotony of their lives.

Alex Johnmeyer

Statement: As a queer and trans artist, my work is often ispired by topics I feel effect the LGBTQ+ community, and in this piece I wanted to speak on identity, assumed gender and chosen gender expression.  As a society we assign gender to inanimate objects all the time, such as toys, cars and mannequins, and I feel that most people are much more respectful of a non-humans' pronouns than of living transgender people. 

This painting for me represents the erasure and disregard of trans and non-binary humans' bodies and identities. 

As gender expansive individuals, the gender we were assigned at birth does not give others the right to assume our gender, or to disregard our identities as trans men, trans women and non-binary humans. Regardless of our gender expression (how we choose to present ourselves through clothing choices, etc), our pronouns, names and identities should be respected and celebrated.   

All of my artwork is based upon my own photography, I then meticulously recreate the photographs in either acrylic or watercolors and ink. I feel the paintings I create are a vibrant translation of my world, an opportunity to capture a moment in time and share it with others. Each of the resulting works is rich in its own story and emotional symbolism, inspired by color theory and societal iconography. I am presently exploring the ideas of community diversity, childhood nostalgia, and finding beauty in the broken. I hope to express personal stories of love, joy, and loss: the struggles and celebrations of life that most everyone can understand.

Website: https://www.alexjohnmeyer.com

Joe Klaus

Statement: Through mixed media, painting and photography along with found objects I seek to find the in-between of reality and daydreams. Consciously exploring the unconscious to discover the deprived memories that never come to the surface; communicating a basic human function and allowing it to still have interpretation. Within this frame work of comfort and the frailty of memories being expressed I pull from my own energies of masculine and feminine, strength and sensuality, color and emotion to create a more interpretive form whether abstract or figurative.

Website: http://joeklaus.com

William Krug

Statement: Through my work, I try to clarify my views on world events and culture, while aspiring to irony and humor. It's an egocentric exercise that's both therapeutic and entertaining. My art cheers me up though I make no claims for the impact of my art on others.

I rely on traditional oil painting techniques. I jokingly call my style a form of Queer Surrealist Symbolism and hope it is engaging and provocative.

Website: http://www.williamkrug.net

Teddy Lepley

Statement: Woodcut does not try to hide its process from the viewer. This forwardness causes me to return to it time and time again as it is the most direct way for me to share my story. A woodcut is made by attacking a woodblock with a gouge, allowing for the introduction of anger, excitement, or sadness in the carving of the image. The surface is then rolled with ink and transferred to paper. A woodcut’s strong contrast and energetic marks can draw a viewer in from afar to investigate. A glance evolves into further study of the image.
My woodcuts depict emotionally challenging moments as well as moments of being or becoming queer. Revealing the mental and emotional turmoil I endured and my subsequent flourishing in my identity allows strangers to see past the labels that have been ascribed to me and other queer people. I believe the struggles of queer people and the blossoming we experience when we live true to ourselves are the strongest testaments against the notion that gender or sexuality is a choice. I make myself vulnerable in my work so that some might find comfort in knowing they are not alone, and those who are unaccepting of queer people might begin to question their prejudices.

Website: http://teddylepley.com

Joseph Liatela

Statement: Our bodies are ours, yet they are not solely our own as they are the medium for our interfacing with the world. As a transgender individual, I see the limitations of embodiment, projection, and visibility as sites rife with potential. These elements inform my practice in which I question institutional, cultural, and medico-legal notions of what constitutes a “complete” or “correct” bodily formation. Utilizing what ?marks? my body as a dissenting body--such as surgical scars, hormone replacement therapy, and medical technology--I make work that examines issues of gender representation, biopolitics, and questions of authenticity.

My background in printmaking fostered an interest in how the manipulation of a surface-such as scars on skin or embossing on paper-alters how it is perceived, and has informed my approach to creating politically grounded, identity-based work. Conscious of the ways history and cultural production manifest in the transgender body, my work uses theory and practice in order to examine the processes of identification, and the social conventions and cultural conditions that uphold and perpetuate these processes.

The gendered social shifts I’ve experienced in direct correlation with my medical transition have inspired me to utilize queer and feminist approaches to phenomenological concepts of human embodiment. Using performance, printmaking, and sculpture, I aim to distinguish between the physiological components that make up bodily existence, and the social connotations the surveilled gendered body takes on in the context of lived experience. In doing so, my work examines the performative nature of identity, demonstrating how it is perceived and enacted at the level of the body.

Website: http://www.josephliatela.com

Julia López

Statement: I am a 1st generation Latina immigrant, currently living in Saint Louis, Missouri and started delving into photography in 2010. The lens in which I work through is shaped by my experiences as a public health professional and licensed clinical social worker. I see relationships between significant moments and the candid, natural beauty that surrounds us every day.

I consistently pursue the relationship between the abstract built environment and nature. My artwork specifically seeks to bring viewers into the abstraction through color contrast, multiple exposures, and a painterly effect. Additionally, the use of the Saint Louis City as the foundational basis for this interpretation is particularly intriguing due to the amount of history and decomposition which surrounds us. The artwork speaks to the living and the forgotten environments.

Website: http://www.angelfallsphotography.com

Mik Patrik McDonnell 

Statement: Hi! My name is Mik Patrik McDonnell and I use they/them pronouns. St.Louis born-and-raised, I am a full-time student pursuing a BFA in studio art and a minor in women, gender, sexuality studies at Washington University in St.Louis. I am always pushing the bounds of my media, and have most recently been grappling with CGI and motion graphics as outlets to revolutionize my practice alongside the traditionally privileged art form of oil painting. I believe in hybridity of process and product. Drawing from Elizabeth Alexander's work, 'The Black Interior,' I adamantly reject the burden of representation in what I call queer interiority. It is a framework that finds itself at the heart of my work as a meta-physical healing process; a ritual of social defiance. My practice is always directly inspired by BIPOC women who have shaped feminist and queer frames of theory many of which have died for this dialogue and won't be in your history books. I owe these women and non-men everything, we all do.

Candace Mothersbaugh

Statement: Since transitioning from male to female at seventeen, the way in which I navigate the world and everyone in it has shifted massively in that I feel I’ve grown more perceptive regarding the ways in which people interact. As a result, the work I make reflects an interest in the interplay of interaction and identity, particularly within the context of transfeminine identities. At its core, the work is an exploration of how people attempt to understand each other, as well as the thoughts or actions that follow this understanding. Therefore, I rely upon people as my subjects, utilizing any number of media to investigate portraiture and the human figure.
In depicting the human form, I invite viewers to project onto the work any thoughts or feelings they have about the aspect of transfemininity I investigate. Creating an opportunity for viewers to consider their relation to my work is essential to me, for it allows them to become a participant in the interaction I am exploring. My depictions of the face or body are often obscured so as to allow viewers to make assumptions and arrive at conclusions regarding who is being depicted and how they might feel about them. All of this is done in an effort to gage how trans women and transfem people exist within the world at large.
While I find connecting with others incredibly enriching, my work is largely a reflection of how I fear my trans identity may cause these interactions to go awry. My goal is not to necessarily offer solutions to this paranoia, but to simply acknowledge it. In doing this, I hope my work can serve as a jumping-off point for further dialogue about how trans people can feel secure in engaging with the world around them.

Ben Osborne

Statement: Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.? - José Esteban Muñoz
Since individual experience of one?s identity can be an ongoing process of discovery, my work centers on the impermanent physicality of gender expression. This complex aspect of humanity finds representational space through different paths: drawing, print, and textiles. Each medium makes the interior visible, turning the deeply personal into self evidence. The actual process of making a garment reflects the subtle, and sometimes more direct choices available in both the construction of clothing as well as identity. Specificity occurs in details of clothing, where there is shared commonality across varying experiences of gender. Materials and imagery reflect an unfinished state, their existence on the verge of becoming fully realized. This ephemeral state of progress is most necessary for the act of discovery, and for the impossibility of simple identification. Excitement results from the anticipation of possible outcomes.

Website: http://benosborneart.com

Tucker Pierce

Statement: Through self-shot images ranging from “selfies” to studio photography, Tucker Pierce documents her experience, relationships and life as a queer, transfemine individual in transition.

The year 2020 was, to over-use a phrase, certainly “difficult and unprecedented.” Forced, like many, into relative isolation, Tucker began to religiously photograph herself. Without the built-in mirror of day-to-day interactions, this diaristic documentation served an important purpose for her ongoing gender “play” and exploration. 

Identity is not a one-way street. In fact, it acts as a conversation, an unspoken contract between individual and witness, in which recognition carries equal wait to expression. As a result, this collection of work becomes an essential tool for Tucker to recognize herself as her body and identity evolve.

Since the rise of social media it has become common practice—especially for queer and trans folk—to develop an internet alter-ego, a finsta, some avenue to play with their external expression from the safety of a smart phone. From this urge emerged an autobiographical series, Glitter & Twang, whereTucker cycles through a changing list of alter egos, dress-up and lenses of presentation. Inspired by artists such as Cindy Sherman, Nikki S. Lee and Nan Goldin, as well as drawing references from fashion, celebrities and other pop media, Tucker explores how femininity and gender are assembled, piece by piece, onto the wireframe of her body, which has changed rapidly after over three years of medical intervention.

Disseminated through social media, group chats and google photo links, this body of work serves as a living diary, a document of the joys, sorrows and private moments of a transexual, midwestern cowgirl, d-list e-girl, artist in her early-late-twenties, #T4T hopeless romantic and all the gray space in between.

Through this process, the truth of transition is exposed. She is not on a journey from point “A” to “B,” male to female, boy to woman, but on a journey towards comfort with play, clarity in the absence of labels and peace without a predetermined endpoint.

Website: https://www.instagram.com/thetuckerpierce/?hl=en

Alexander Prestia

Statement: We in a paradox of a shared experience of separation and isolation. Many artists around the globe have turned to live-online broadcasts for figure drawing and still life. These images were drawn during a live-online figure drawing session. The image abstracts the body, the light, and the environment to merge, separate, combine, and to lose distinction, as a way to emulate the effects that continuous sheltering in a solitary environment has over one's identity, boundaries, and self-control. Digital art created in Procreate for the iPad Pro.

Website: http://www.a1205x.com

Jared Rourke

Statement: I’m a multidisciplinary artist, though calling me “disciplined” is a stretch. I go through intense ADHD-fueled obsessions that burn out quickly. I discovered zines by way of the riot grrrl bands my older sister listened to: an angry, raw medium far more accessible to a fat, queer rural kid than gallery walls are. Zines are the star that my work orbits, keeping me tethered no matter how far I stray.

Inspired by writers like Lindy West and Sonya Renee Taylor, my work is a confessional attempt to connect with folks who don’t see themselves celebrated. If it weren’t for writers like them, fat-positive and outspoken, I would still be making art that reinforced negative stereotypes about which bodies are attractive. I accepted the pressures of gay male culture and erased my own body from the discussion one six-pack at a time. It wasn’t until my 2017 zine Body Like Mine that I published anything featuring a fat person in a visual medium.

My current piece is a collage of petals cut from my old zines radiating from a new photograph. Collage is a way for me to literally deconstruct my past work and use it to venerate fat bodies. The piece is an open love letter to fat folks. We are radiant, and we deserve to know that.

Website: https://jaredrourke.com

Michelle Tangas

Statement: Reclaiming the female body is one of my main goals with the artwork I am producing. Often, the female figure is used in forms of advertising and media to please the male viewers and to sell products. I aim to reclaim the over sexualized figure and turn it into a pop art painting that is both visually appealing and has a strong composition. I found inspiration for this concept when I discovered a crate of Playboy magazines, that were from the 80s, while organizing a friend's garage. I loved how the women were photographed in each magazine. Every photo was aesthetically pleasing to look at and artistically done. In order to capture a similar aesthetic in my own paintings, I take photos of models doing mundane activities while topless. I seek diversity with the models in my work, to showcase the beauty of all body types.

Jacob Wan

Statement: Being Chinese and gay, I explore sexuality, relationship, and balance from personal experience through mixed-media book arts. As a contemporary bookbinder, I craft conceptual books as expressions of emotions, sequences of consciousness, and collections of moments. By experimenting with the materiality of the page, thread, and cover, I deploy personal memories to discover the identity, portray solitude, and celebrate the importance of oneself.

My books are inspired by introspection, imagination, and compassion. Through color, mythology, and symbolism, I work with textiles, embroidery, papermaking, and other techniques to showcase the desires, tenderness, and fragility of manhood, homosexuality, and Romanticism. My ideas often appear late at night, and my creative process involves improvisation. It helps me to keep the marks organically to mimic the subconsciousness, and I adjust the pages by editing, continue by building, and explore by combining paper, threads, and other objects. The journey of making a book is similar to puzzling; starting with fragmental ideas and matching them in a meaningful position that leads to a final answer.

Along with stitching traditional bound books with handmade paper and assembling sculptural books with unconventional materials, and I am interested in creating book-like spaces to evoke an immersive atmosphere for the audiences. I aspire to bring the sense of ceremony of reading a book into my mixed-media book installation; the viewers enter the space like they open a book, and they close the cover when they exit the space for a poetic experience. Through curating the different forms of books in purposeful location based on the site-structure, I create an implied book that the audience’s walking flow is the thread to bind the pages of books together as a whole.

Website: http://www.jacobzwan.com

Angela Weis

Statement: I have always been interested in the fanciful. What is life, if not a search for joy through frivolity? My subject matter always changes but I find the process of art making to be the physical embodiment of fanciful. I imbue my pieces with energy through my mark making, treatment of materials, and color.

Aaron Wilder

Statement: Aaron Wilder is an interdisciplinary artist who blurs boundaries between the analog and the digital, the public and the private, and the unassuming and the instigative. He uses his own experiences and sense of identity as a lens through which he explores the introspective and social processes of contemporary culture. Through an analytical deconstruction of these processes, his artistic approach is akin to that of an anthropologist, sociologist, and psychologist combined. Wilders concept-driven projects all incorporate his core belief that art can and should be used as a tool for generating critical thinking, dialogue, knowledge sharing, and understanding between individuals with divergent world perspectives.

Wilder's work tends to be very analytical as a way to better understand social constructs, which are categories developed by society that forward perception of an individual or group created culturally as opposed to biologically. Social constructs include gender, race, religion, and many other groupings that strongly impact an individual’s sense of identity. These social constructs are perpetuated by how a child is raised, language and other communication practices, and visible signs including advertising, popular culture, and education. While there are some innocuous impacts of social constructs, there are also many negative aspects, including perpetuating systemic racism, sexism, homophobia, etc.

Having grown up in Arizona as a closeted gay man, Wilder was raised in a very conservative evangelical Christian environment. He was surrounded by misguided family members trying to educate him on how to avoid those who are marginalized in society. All the while, he was secretly one of those marginalized “sinners.” This experience has made Wilder familiar with overcoming not only homophobia but also racism, sexism, and prejudice against other religions. This perspective has enabled him with a great capacity for empathy and deep respect for working with others from backgrounds different than his own. Wilder seeks to leverage his own experience to incite dialogue around how people think of their own identity and how they relate to others perceived as different.

Website: https://www.aaronwilder.com/

Erin Wohletz

Statement: I make work about my experience with nonbinary queerness. These prints are made utilizing the traditional materials, processes, and language of naturalist prints. Naturalist prints were created as images of scientific study. Animals and plants were drawn in order to define and gain understanding of their nature. However, instead of animal or botanical specimens the analyzed subject is a page. Within this page important language, marks relationships and symbols are laid out for analysis.

Sketchbooks, notebooks, and diary pages are spaces for argument and discovery. Problems are worked out before finalized. I?m interested in this transitory argumentative space. Notepads catch subliminal thoughts because you're not fully paying attention. How do we formulate our ideas? This private page is a place for unedited thought. A page has two faces. I allow the viewer to see one. My self discovery of queerness has come through a lot of internal struggle and argument. A private back and forth argument. In my current body of work I allow the viewer into my private analytical space.

Symbolism has a deep tradition within queer history. Often double coded it allowed and continues to allow members of the community to communicate to the in crowd while also eluding would be persecutors. I am consistently intrigued by subtext and nonverbal communication. In the same way that scientific prints were used for education, I seek to educate the viewer on LGBTQ+ history and the nature of non-binary feeling.

Trying to understand my own queerness has involved a lot of categorizing of information and symbols. It’s almost like I have an internal pros/cons list going but instead its a gay/straight list. I couldn?t help but try and place both sides on a scale and try to figure out which side seemed heavier. I’m interested in putting the viewer in a similar analytical space. Trying to decipher moments and symbols to find meaning. I think this was the intrinsic feeling to my discovery of my own queerness. Discovering symbols and then the lightbulb went off.

Website: http://ewohletz.com

Sophia Wojnovich

Statement: My practice focuses on materiality, performance, sex and sexuality, semiotics, fetishism, and power. Through design, I explore desire, overwhelming scale, voyeurism,and erotica. The objects I make take nods from sexual tropes, toys and furniture, and performance objects. Through specific material and form choices, I make work that encourages exciting interaction and exploration. With my furniture work, I create pieces that are large and demand attention. The scale of the work asks for interaction and exploration by the viewer. With simple but deliberate form, the focus of the furniture becomes how a person interacts with it and how they feel while doing so. My smaller works are playful and have fun with the user. Toying a more obvious line of sexuality, these pieces are prideful in their display of desire and create exciting interaction for the user.

Website: http://www.sophiawojnovich.com