This twelve piece concentration is about my personal outlook on a number of things as an openly transgender person, mainly focusing on how those perspectives have been altered since I came out. There is a fairly large range of conceptual ideas within all twelve pieces, giving each of them a unique feeling stretching from rage, to sadness, and even elation.
Morbid tones surround the convoluted range of concepts that my pieces hold. They represent my own eternal struggle finding out what I want from a world that has consistently rejected me as a queer individual. In the piece titled "Heretic", for example, I painted an inverted cross to represent my feelings of inferiority when it comes to organized religion; the cross means that I am not worthy of god. Prior to feeling this way, I tried to force myself to fit in and understand the faith that I didn't have. Unsurprisingly, religion doesn't take too kindly to queer individuals. I made this piece to show my struggle with coexisting, and to cope with the loss of family due to their religious affiliations. Similarly, although not from a religious view, my piece titled "False Security" implicitly shows how I have unsuccessfully tried to "stitch" myself into a painfully closed-minded society. Reds and purples appear numerous times through this whole set, which not only expresses a constant state of anxiety and stress, but also stays true to the general morbid undertone of each piece. The skulls represent me, which makes them somewhat a set of self portraits- the ghoulish aspect of them stems from my personal interest in morbid relics, and the idea that growth emanates from death and darkness- as represented in the piece titled "Burden". |