With the prompt of “For The Audience”, I wanted to create a healing piece for myself playing in the realm of intimacy, sexuality and coming of age. As a product of Catholic and Lutheran private schools, much of my childhood has been jaded by the fetishization of uniformed girls and lack of autonomy for female bodies in religion. Coming out as non-binary in high school and still existing in these greatly anti-girlhood environments only made this more challenging to cope with. Dating and puberty were even more of a buffer to understanding of self in this constant conundrum of existing the “wrong” way.
Much of my perception of the world was formed through the experiences I had in my teens looking for attention and love in the wrong places. I have not had the worst of it, but some of my experiences live with me to this day and have greatly influenced the way I hold myself and the way my inner voice speaks to me. These pieces are a commentary on all of these experiences from my personal coming of age; inside jokes with myself about trauma and “letters” to my younger-self and those who hurt me.
The ideal setting for this project would be a screening of the video accompanied by the photo and collage either side of a video projection. The photo and collage feature similar imagery from the video to tie in the theme among the three pieces and make them a unified body of work.