BODIES of KNOWLEDGE: Gender, Sex, Science, and Medicine
Stretch Marks
Title: Stretch Marks
Artist: Keagan Polentz
Description: Stretch Marks is a work of art addressing the social construct of having stretch marks in our society. I have recently dealt with complicated emotions toward developing stretch marks on my body and have felt shame and guilt about "letting myself" grow them. I want to create this work to show myself [and others] that stretch marks are not something to be ashamed of because they are still a part of our bodies, which we should never apologize for. Stretch marks are often not addressed within the media or any outlet platforms. Typically if someone does have them when posting an image, they are edited out. Even when considering renaissance paintings, the idealized figure never demonstrates any “flaws” such as stretch marks. My goal is to normalize the conversation around them and hopefully help some people start to love their stretch marks.
Materials / Medium: mirror, nylon stockings
Bite Me
Title: Bite Me
Artist: Kay Bunting
Description: I’ve always had trouble seeing myself as more than what my body defines me as. Upon creating the idea for this sculpture, I wanted to show aggression and newfound masculinity within myself. I had settled on the imagery of the angler fish, with its large gaping mouth and careful lure as a manifestation of my aggression and subjectivity in the ways I present myself. Further research informed me that only female angler fish have these intimidating features. In a constant strive to depict myself as what I feel in my heart, I am constantly rooted back to my own interchangeable design. I am angry, I want to scream, and I want to feel more than I am. Until that is possible I’ll hide in the mouth of this fish hoping to be seen as I strive to be seen.
Materials / Medium: chicken wire, paper mache, spray paint
Harnessed Transmasculine Torso
Title: Harnessed Transmasculine Torso
Artist: Alaryx
Description: This abstracted representational torso depicts a transmasculine figure wearing a handcrafted leather BDSM harness. It is a stylistic and technical exploration that seeks to connect the audience with the queer reality of BDSM culture. The lived world of BDSM is wonderfully diverse, but its current mainstream art representations focus too entirely on the idealized and cisgender body. What happens when we pair BDSM-associated accessories with a torso that has had a gender-affirming mastectomy? By creating pseudo-representational, diverse forms, I hope that the same gender-and-body-diverse people who express themselves through BDSM can experience themselves in my art and for the broader community to normalize diversity of bodies and interests. Please take the opportunity to embrace any emotions that may be associated with the works for you while also accepting them as they explicitly are.
Interested in this piece? Make an offer! Send inquiries to tenzer@lclark.edu
Materials / Medium: ceramic, leather, acrylic ink
Artist Statement: Alaryx is a nonbinary transmasculine (he/they) student majoring in Studio Art and Psychology with a minor in French. Through their art practice, Alaryx seeks to engage with beauty and subjects with personal meaning such as kink, Jewishness, gender/sexuality, and themes of transformation. Alaryx was born and raised in Roanoke, Virginia and feels that being from a small, Southern city informed his relationship with gender and sexuality as key components of his identity. You can find their work in the upcoming senior art exhibition opening in the Hoffman Gallery on April 14, 2023.
Robo-Girl
Title: Robo-Girl
Artist: Hannah Lin
Description: Robo-Girl is a digital piece done with procreate.
Materials / Medium: Procreate, Digital Art
Artist Statement: https://hanlinportfolio.mystrikingly.com/
being eaten alive
Title: being eaten alive
Artist: Kincaid DeBell
Description: Is it always going to feel this way?
Feel what way?
Like we’re all being eaten alive.
Or burning out.
Not that beautiful, more gorey.
No.
No what?
No, you won’t always feel this way.
I feel like a child, but my mother is so far away.
It’s okay to cry. To hurt means you are alive.
Growing up into this body that seems sometimes like such a burden feels like being eaten alive by my own blood and skin, all the memories held in this frame, one I can never shed. I am thankful for my body, I am hurt by my body, I feel beautiful in my body, I feel like roadkill in my body. This work of art was created on a whim, during a time of feeling lost and straining for purpose and thought, and has stuck with me since it’s creation. I was inspired by the things I saw around me and the way I felt at this time, about my connection to my body and some kind of prayer to have someone assure me it will be alright. When there’s no one to tell me I will make it through okay, I need to tell myself, and I can do this best through art. Please interpret this piece however it resonates with you, there is nothing right or wrong about how it makes you feel. Agree, disagree, resent it, adore it. All I hope is that it evokes something in you.
Materials / Medium: pencil, pen, marker, digital
Artist Statement: Kincaid DeBell, (he/they, but would really prefer to just be a person in a body), Studio Art Major 25’. Genderqueer, but really they feel more of a connection to the stars and the way moss only grows on one side of tree, and how fire is destructive and lifesaving. Art is the only real way he understands how to maintain sanity in this deeply difficult and complex existence. Draws little stars on everything they can get their hands on. Main medium is illustration, but he’s taking time this semester to delve into sculpture and other forms of media. Want a commission? Email them :)
https://kincaiddebell.crevado.com/
How to Eat Pussy
Title: How to Eat Pussy
Artist: Akina
Description: The majority of us have gone through weird, shameful, heteronormative, male-centric, and destructive sex ed classes. Because of this, people with pussies (PWPS™) have not been given the proper attention with regards to their sexual needs and rights. There are so many important ties between being healthy sexually and mentally, and especially in these pandemic times it is so, so important to be doing everything we can to ensure our mental and sexual needs are being met. So let's celebrate the PWPS orgasm and consider it to be a key part of achieving sexual and mental health. Use this zine as a starting point to educate yourself and others about the ways in which we can all be doing better in helping PWPS achieve the orgasms and sexual health we all deserve.
If you're interested in having your own copy or sharing a copy of this zine, feel free to use this digital copy or this printer formatted one!
Materials / Medium: marker, pen, printed images
Stand By
Title: Stand By
Artist: B.E.
Materials / Medium: film photography
Body in Repose
Title: Body in Repose
Artist: Elliott Negrin
Description: Taking ownership of my body as a trans person, and allowing myself the comfort and freedom to exist in a natural state is a form of empowerment. In my body of work, I examine myself through the lens of a film camera, and how capturing my figure in stillness allows for preservation and appreciation.
Materials / Medium: 35mm Black and White Film Inkjet Print
Artist Statement: Elliott Negrin (LC ‘25) is a World Langauges major (Japanese and Spanish) and an Art minor. He identifies as queer and jewish, and expresses the intersection of his identities in his work.
Instagram @gotohelliott
Springtime
Title: Springtime
Artist: Ollie Price
Description: This work is meant to highlight the lack of queer artwork and recognition of queer influences on art throughout history. The image is a painted collage of artworks inspired by three historically-revered artists, Pierre-Auguste Cot, Gustav Klimt, and Vincent Van Gogh. The main figures from “Springtime” by Cot are, however, changed from a man and a woman to two women, one of which has her face obscured by one of Van Gogh’s signature sunflowers. This represents the erasure of queer relationships and artwork throughout the culture surrounding art and the masking of the Queer community despite their heavy influence and association within artistic circles.
Materials / Medium: oil paint
Artist Statement: https://olivia-price-art.webnode.page/
Gendered Portraits
Title: Gendered Portraits
Artist: Lee Hinkle
Description: This is a series of self portraits, each drawn 6 months apart. While making the first portrait, I was suddenly overwhelmed with sadness and disappointment in my body-- its shapes and curves were appalling.The first portrait is a confused, angry work of art. The second one came from a place of acceptance, peace, and stability. They are quite different portraits of the same person, but they speak volumes about my process of growth and healing.
Materials / Medium: Watercolor/Ink on Paper
Artist Statement: Hi! I'm Lee, a queer, non-binary, transgender junior SOAN major at Lewis & Clark. I work mostly with watercolors and clay. Enjoy looking at my art :)
Untitled 1
Title: Untitled 1
Artist: Anna Geise
Materials / Medium: Newsprint paper, charcoal
Artist Statement: My name is Anna, I am a first year at LC. I am non binary and queer. I find a lot of inspiration in abstraction and randomness in my work. I like black ink, charcoal, procreate black and white designs, you name it. My work also lives in the graffiti world a lot. I like creating symbols, sigils, and phrases that express myself. I also recently found a love for DIY tattooing, and more specifically, tattooing my own drawings on very supportive friends and clients. I love spiky things, powerful things, and magical things. Tattooing feels super queer to me, at least when I do it, because it’s this magic form of self-expression and changing of your physical form. I love and am so inspired by the queer people I have found myself surrounded by through art and tattooing.
Untitled 2
Title: Untitled 2
Artist: Anna Geise
Description: This tattoo I did as part of a trade with another local portland DIY tattooer, and it was a really great experience. We partially blasted over one of his current tats, and I love the chaos and blending that creates in a person’s tattoos. It just feels really full and dark and dope. I got to tattoo my first chest and he got to give me a crazy blackwork candelabra in addition to my arm sleeve!
Materials / Medium: Tattoo ink, needles, machine, pure queer joy
Artist Statement: My name is Anna, I am a first year at LC. I am non binary and queer. I find a lot of inspiration in abstraction and randomness in my work. I like black ink, charcoal, procreate black and white designs, you name it. My work also lives in the graffiti world a lot. I like creating symbols, sigils, and phrases that express myself. I also recently found a love for DIY tattooing, and more specifically, tattooing my own drawings on very supportive friends and clients. I love spiky things, powerful things, and magical things. Tattooing feels super queer to me, at least when I do it, because it’s this magic form of self-expression and changing of your physical form. I love and am so inspired by the queer people I have found myself surrounded by through art and tattooing.
Queer Joy
Title: Queer Joy
Artist: Anna Geise
Materials / Medium: Paper, krink ballpoint ink marker
Artist Statement: My name is Anna, I am a first year at LC. I am non binary and queer. I find a lot of inspiration in abstraction and randomness in my work. I like black ink, charcoal, procreate black and white designs, you name it. My work also lives in the graffiti world a lot. I like creating symbols, sigils, and phrases that express myself. I also recently found a love for DIY tattooing, and more specifically, tattooing my own drawings on very supportive friends and clients. I love spiky things, powerful things, and magical things. Tattooing feels super queer to me, at least when I do it, because it’s this magic form of self-expression and changing of your physical form. I love and am so inspired by the queer people I have found myself surrounded by through art and tattooing.
She Writes to Me: A Trans Textual
Title: She Writes to Me: A Trans Textual
Artist: Tess Frisque & Kellen Rice
Description:
Tess:
I took these photos almost one year ago as my Photography II final. She Writes To Me is a collaborative work—it is intended to be a complementary series to the autotheory essay written by my partner, Kellen. My role was to shoot, process, and print a photographic catalog that brings Kellen’s body and story to life. My goal was to create a body of work that reflected my partner’s story while still making it my own art. I wanted it to evoke emotion and be intriguing enough for the viewers to want to learn about the story that inspired it. Rather than just documenting poses or showing off a body, these photographs work to reveal a story and capture the act of Kellen being in their body. Some shots focus on the surface of the skin and the stillness of the words, and some shots are action shots which highlight narrative and movement.
The photos initially came out with very warm tones. My first instinct was to neutralize those tones, but I found this made the photos look too clinical. In the end, I chose to keep the warmth to accentuate the feeling of intimacy I wanted to create. Being able to play with color like this was one of the main reasons I chose digital photography for this project instead of my usual film photography. For a work about queerness, it felt necessary to focus on color and bring out the intimacy of the moment. I originally expected to use a tripod, but instead found myself moving around the studio organically. This also contributed to the intimacy I was aiming for. I wanted to capture as many body parts from as many different angles, distances, and perspectives as possible. Again, digital allowed me to take as many photos as I needed (which ended up being around 400). Additionally, I chose to print big, as they felt too important and striking to be confined to 8x10 margins. I would print them to be life-sized if I could.
Kellen:
She Writes To Me draws from a period of time when I used to write small phrases on my body in permanent ink. Anything that felt important, for any reason, ended up inked into my skin so I wouldn’t forget. As I collected more and more of these words and phrases, they eventually turned into poems. My writing became a personal archive.
Poetry stems from an intuited knowledge. It can express that which is unintelligible but somehow understood. To me, this kind of unintelligible, felt knowledge comes first from the body. Poetry takes what is embodied and puts it into words. My body is, among other things, the body of a girl. From the very first note penned on my skin, my body was trying to tell me this: she was writing to me. At the time, I had no idea I was trans, but my body knew. I only discovered this when I finally revisited my archive of writing and found that she had always been there. Looking back, it’s painfully obvious.
For She Writes To Me, I visit the past again. As a collaborative work, my role was to write my story and plan a way to give it physicality; I chose to model it. To do this, I reinscribed a large portion of my archive onto my body. This is an autotheoretical practice: I tangibly exhibit how living and writing inform and complicate each other. The project brings embodied knowledge to the surface of the skin. To see the body is, at the same time, to see its knowledge on display; the words of the body are written on the body by the body. To me, these words constitute the abstract, poetic story of my transformation. My body can only be viewed in the context of the story written upon it, and in the context of my story, it is a girl’s body. The work can’t be viewed without also reading the language of transness.
Materials / Medium: Photograph
Beautiful Like a Woman
Title: Beautiful Like a Woman
Artist: Anneka Barton
Description: In my piece, “Beautiful Like A Woman,” I explore the relationship between my gender identity, folklore, and the natural world. Based on a poem I wrote with the same title, this art considers my relationship with gender and the inherent voyeurism of nude paintings. No matter the intention, there will always be at least one leering viewer. I aimed to mold my body into a less traditionally aesthetic pose, curling it in on itself instead of stretching myself out into a sensual form. I pushed my form up against the natural world to represent how I view myself. A creation of nature. I included the jackalope head to juxtapose the delight we find in mixing natural forms and crossing boundaries with the common denial of any gender expression outside of the binary. Both and neither, I am just a creature.
I do not want to be beautiful like a woman
I want the beauty of a towering forest,
All encompassing and powerful,
Fear inspiring.
To be viewed not as an object of pleasure
But a mirage of beauty,
Elusive and untouchable
With places men can never reach.
I want to shake in the wind
Like a dance,
A warning.
Not in fear of lurking shadows in
Parking lots and empty streets
I do not want to be a woman
I want to be the thing in the woods that men fear.
Materials / Medium: oil on canvas
Living While
Title: Living While
Artist: Oakley Rae Phoenix
Description: 'Living While' is a four part demonstration of a bit of what it is to live as a Black, trans, AFAB, Gen Z, artist, and autist. My intent is to depict my identities tripping over each other, muddled together, and pulled apart. RED, PURPLE, PINK, and BLUE each zero in on a specific identity (Gen Z, artist, trans, and AFAB respectively) with other labels filtering in and out. I chose the overlayed colors after each shoot to draw more emotions to the surface of the work and to help tie it all together - red being a marker of anger, purple as a sign of royalty, pink as a queer signifier, and blue as a show of despair. For four little pictures, 'Living While' packs in plenty of thoughts on how living as a multiply marginalized person forces one to bifurcate and trifurcate their selves as a means of survival. I hope the audience will take time to characterize RED, PURPLE, PINK, and BLUE internally and to ask what each self might face entering out into the world.
Materials / Medium: prints
Artist Statement: Oakley Rae Phoenix (he/they) is a Black multiracial trans and gender non-conforming dancer and choreographer focusing on queering hip hop and contemporary, with side gigs in book writing, performance art, and student body president-ing. I care about too much and do too much, and it's all gay, brown, and artsy.
https://oakleyraephoenix.wixsite.com/oakleyraephoenix
dragon egg
Title: dragon egg
Artist: Maia Foster-O'Neal
Materials / Medium: digital art, zine
Artist Statement: Comics as a format occupy the unruly, synergetic liminal space between story and art, pictures and poetry. No stranger to liminal spaces, I have found that making autobiographical comics is one of the most effective tools I have to affirm myself as I navigate the complexities of my own gender. When I first began sharing my autobiographical comics – intensely introspective, often idiosyncratic, a little goofy – online, I was stunned at how many people reached out to tell me that they heard their own story echoed in mine, that my Gender Journey™ helped them feel less devastatingly alone. What began as basically a visual journaling practice for me has transformed into a source of deep human connection, a space of possibility and transcendence. If you, too, resonate with my comics: I’ll meet you with a light and a story somewhere on the road, fellow traveler.
https://sparklemaia.tumblr.com/
extremely specific things I'm looking forward to after top surgery
Title: extremely specific things I'm looking forward to after top surgery
Artist: Maia Foster-O'Neal
Materials / Medium: digital art, zine
Artist Statement: Comics as a format occupy the unruly, synergetic liminal space between story and art, pictures and poetry. No stranger to liminal spaces, I have found that making autobiographical comics is one of the most effective tools I have to affirm myself as I navigate the complexities of my own gender. When I first began sharing my autobiographical comics – intensely introspective, often idiosyncratic, a little goofy – online, I was stunned at how many people reached out to tell me that they heard their own story echoed in mine, that my Gender Journey™ helped them feel less devastatingly alone. What began as basically a visual journaling practice for me has transformed into a source of deep human connection, a space of possibility and transcendence. If you, too, resonate with my comics: I’ll meet you with a light and a story somewhere on the road, fellow traveler.
https://sparklemaia.tumblr.com/
breaking down boxes
Title: breaking down boxes
Artist: Maia Foster-O'Neal
Materials / Medium: digital art, zine
Artist Statement: Comics as a format occupy the unruly, synergetic liminal space between story and art, pictures and poetry. No stranger to liminal spaces, I have found that making autobiographical comics is one of the most effective tools I have to affirm myself as I navigate the complexities of my own gender. When I first began sharing my autobiographical comics – intensely introspective, often idiosyncratic, a little goofy – online, I was stunned at how many people reached out to tell me that they heard their own story echoed in mine, that my Gender Journey™ helped them feel less devastatingly alone. What began as basically a visual journaling practice for me has transformed into a source of deep human connection, a space of possibility and transcendence. If you, too, resonate with my comics: I’ll meet you with a light and a story somewhere on the road, fellow traveler.
https://sparklemaia.tumblr.com/
six months
Title: six months
Artist: Maia Foster-O'Neal
Materials / Medium: digital art, zine
Artist Statement: Comics as a format occupy the unruly, synergetic liminal space between story and art, pictures and poetry. No stranger to liminal spaces, I have found that making autobiographical comics is one of the most effective tools I have to affirm myself as I navigate the complexities of my own gender. When I first began sharing my autobiographical comics – intensely introspective, often idiosyncratic, a little goofy – online, I was stunned at how many people reached out to tell me that they heard their own story echoed in mine, that my Gender Journey™ helped them feel less devastatingly alone. What began as basically a visual journaling practice for me has transformed into a source of deep human connection, a space of possibility and transcendence. If you, too, resonate with my comics: I’ll meet you with a light and a story somewhere on the road, fellow traveler.
https://sparklemaia.tumblr.com/
All Dressed Up
Title: All Dressed Up
Artist: B.E.
Materials / Medium: photograph
Now Inhale
Title: Now Inhale
Artist: B.E.
Materials / Medium: photograph
