I remember being 15 and doing an art project on the Klub Kids, who I was obsessed with and still totally obsessed with. Since then I have been obsessed with gay culture. I am not gay myself but I have always had a connection, I think it's because I felt like an outsider and could relate to these incredible colorful characters. Over the years I have followed, researched and just enjoyed what the LGBT community has to offer. However, I have never really looked into the T.
Amanda Lepore…. Chaz Bono…. That's about how many trans people I have heard of back when I was 15, thank god things have changed.
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| Amanda Lepore |
Now we have modeled such as Carmen Carrera and Hari Nef (who I totally fell in love with in transparent). Actors such as Laverne Cox, Trace Lysette, Ian Harvie and Candis Cayne. This is just a few names just in the limelight. There are many others people out there being who they truly believe they should be. Of course everything is not rosy, there has been numerous of trans people being murdered just because they are trans. Don't even get me started on the bathroom drama in America. There is still a long way to go, but let's celebrate these artists who have paved the way and creating amazing work today.
Tuesday Smillie
I came across Smillie whilst researching for this blog and just loved her work. Smillie is a Brooklyn based artist who works in employs watercolours, collage and textiles as media to explore transgender feminist politics. She is interested in art as a form of protest and as a means of celebration. By cultural production to honor those dearest to her as well as queer and feminist icons. Smillie resists the hetero-normative eraser of non conformist queer identities.
There is not much information about Tuesday Smillie work online but I find it fascinating. I have always been impressed with photo montage. I feel it is a brutal way to create art, expressing your vision with humorous images, distraught figures and political messages, just look at Hannah Hoch and George Grosz work. Smillie photo-montage work are self portrait, she places herself with scissors, needles and thread and shapes which look like broken glass. To me this works looks like her representing her transition, the sharp hard images representing the pain and sacrifice she has physically and mentally been through. This is just my interpretation of the work, it could mean something else to others.I love the vulnerability of her work and I am looking forward to see more of her creations.
Kate Weakley
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| Dissociation, 2014 |
This picture shows the changes of a man transitioning to a women. Her breast are forming but her face doesn't “match” her new womanly body. Her Self Portrait, 2014 is my favorite, it's a very simple message but yet still powerful. The man with the disjointed face is the artist when she was still in her old body, the figure on the right is the artist five month into her transition.
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| Self Portrait, 2014 |
It is a very simple idea for a portrait but that's what I like about it. The artist wants her body of work to allow cisgender, heteronormative audience to experience the transgender narrative, in which that make the subject approachable and relatable. I believe this piece does this in a more gentle way. I am sure this artist is just at the beginning of her career and I am looking forward in seeing her work evolve.
Greer Lankton
Greet Lankon is such an unusual artists and had such a unique talent. She was a big character in the east village art scene, where she crafted dolls modeled of her friends she worked with. Her work is like how Nan Golden described her, “beautiful, glamorous, fragile with a disarming sweetness.” She used her friends and celebrities she knew and made them into modern day sculptures. Did she know that her friends and style were all going to be icons of their time! Hello Liza, Candy Darling and Jackie O.
She created her work with found objects, making them look distraught and twisted. She would change the sizes of the models making them fat, then skinny, then fat again, changing the faces and clothing. This obsession of change was prevalent in her work and her life. Her work can easily relate to her transformation from man to woman but I think her work is more about the pressures of being a woman. Even as a punk rock New York City artist you still have pressures of looking good. Not being pretty enough, thin enough, smart enough, these are the pressures that women (and men) go through day to day. Lena Dunham, who is producing a documentary about Lankton said it very well about her work,
“We all feel that sense of being lost in and betrayed by our own bodies. She made it poetry.”
My favorite piece is of her bust of Candy Darling. A Warhol superstar, she was herself transgender who starred in many Warhol films. The bust is a beautiful yet painful piece of a homage to her friend. On the back of the bust is the song, Candy says by the Velvet Underground and on the front is a heart shape cut out. In the cut out are objects, relating to the song and her personal likes, such as makeup. Again it's a theme of the body as the first lyrics of the song was, Candy says I've come to hate my body.
I only scratched the surface with trans art and trans identity I need to come back and look at different artist who have different transition stories. I hope if anyone reads this that I didn't suck understanding the work and that we should research and understand more about trans identity.
MAW
