Model Drawings
Final Assignment
Ideation & Process
Final Drawings
Several states in the US are creating harmful bills that seek to ban transgender care for transgender people, but especially transgender youth. LGBTQ youth are a vulnerable population at higher risk of suicide, and many of these bills will separate those youth from life saving care. I wanted to bridge the gap between the LGBTQ community, as well as point to similarities between multiple issues that are ongoing at this time, many of which are happening in the US currently. Gay rights, trans rights, and women’s rights are delicately interwoven but also have a significant amount of undeniable overlap. I want to strengthen our community and a sense of solidarity towards each other at a time when the world is seemingly trying to tear us apart, and take away our identities.
By bringing back the history of Stonewall and other LGBT movements on the skirt, I wanted to strengthen the narrative that we have all been through this before, we have to look to what has been achieved in the past in order to remember why we are still here in the first place, and that many of the issues that existed then, persist even now, but that in the face of adversity we must find our voices and find strength. The skirt hearkens to activism, but also has decorative features that speak to what is currently passing through American legal systems to eradicate trans children and youth within the very places they are expected to function in society, at school, where they will be expected to somehow safely complete their education. These bills also target the lives and careers of citizens who keep trans identities private, who support the expression of such identities, and they seek to punish the parents of trans youth, attempting to effectively dismantle community built around transgender support and abolish trans identities completely.
The hat uses similar imagery to ask the question of how life continues on without transgender youth, without children to fill our playgrounds and schools, and what life will be in their absence. B. Parker created an artwork in 2015 for the Transgender day of Visibility in which the phrase “Give us our roses while we’re still here” was popularized. The flower motifs are a nod to a similar sentiment. With the boxers, I wanted to counter-argue against trans medicalism and the concept that you have to medically transition in order to be transgender or identify as your true gender.
Clothing was a medium that allowed me to explore different methods of planning and execute my ideas in a different way. The canvases I used were more exciting and engaging for me and gave me a chance to consider making clothing which is something I used to design a lot when I was much younger. Clothing is one way of exhibiting our identity and society often still views clothing as a gendered item so stereotypical assumptions can be made from an article of clothing and I wanted to play with that, too. Clothing exhibits a ‘brand,’ or whatever our brand may be, and that is something to consider as well in making clothing or art that focuses around clothing. Most of the articles were found, already owned or bought second hand. I didn’t buy any new clothing in the making of my art pieces.
I have known all kinds of trans folks and there is no particular surgery or amount of Hormone replacement therapy that gives someone the okay to be called the gender they identify as as a marker of what makes someone trans. I wanted to normalize trans bodies for what they are.
I continued what I had started with the skirt initially, with the inclusion of important trans historic figures. I feel that people of colour are the pioneers of important activism in the trans / LGBTQIA2S+ community and I wanted to honour them as such, and add more to the sense of a drawing with their inclusion. The featured drawings are of Marsha P. Johnson, indigenous artist & activist We:wa, and the Chief Woman Indigenous figure Bar Chee Ampe (based on a modern interpretation of what she would have looked like,) who is important to the Two Spirit community, and who took on masculine roles among the Crow.