19 Self-Care Tips To Try Out. Oil on found wood. 69" x 30." 2018.
This is a painting of a knife fight with myself. Two versions of me grapple and wrestle for control, but both end up symmetrically and simultaneously triumphant and defeated. Despite being literally impaled on knives, each figure reaches to the other in caress. With depictions of care and violence so intricately and intrinsically linked, I attempt to subvert the mainstream trans narrative of hating one's body and to portray my own relationship with my body in a more nuanced way than just love or hate. Committing violence on my body can turn my body into something I love, but not without destroying it in the process. And trying to love my body as it is cannot be possible without destroying myself. As the self devours the body, the body devours the self — a snake swallowing its own tail.
Exhibited as part of Send Help from 6/5/2018 to 6/11/2018 at the Mohr Student Gallery, Stanford, CA.
Published in kunstkammer: Princeton University Undergraduate Journal of Art (Spring 2019)
