Expectations about beauty, gender, and otherness have shaped what I see when I look in the mirror, often loaded with a feeling of not being enough. Self-portraiture has been the tool I use to learn a new way to view myself as a trans man based in celebration, acceptance, and internal truth. Using still imagery, collage and video, my work aims to create a conversation regarding transition that goes beyond a single destination, and reflect an ongoing, multifaceted experience that is a vital part of our human ecology. It explores the landscape, masculine and feminine gender norms, and the mirrors that we construct to view ourselves, both literal and imaginary. 

Working within the natural world has been one of my greatest teachers in reclaiming residence within myself. Nature has no gender. Nature is beauty, and it is also decay and metamorphosis.  Using water, plants, and soil as my reflection, I am reminded of the dynamic ecosystem of my existence; one that includes beauty as much as ugliness. Nature becomes my mirror.  

While attending an artist residency at Sitka Center in 2020 I sought refuge in the coastal forests of Cascade Head. 2020 was also the start of a surge in legislation seeking to deny access to basic healthcare, education, athletics, and bathrooms to trans individuals. The work I started at Sitka sought a landscape of belonging at a time when laws passed were enforcing the contrary. The result was a new body of work including The Place Between, a fold out photobook of 16 photographs connecting the body to place in an ever changing landscape.   

In 2022, while recovering from a month-long case of poison oak, I began to photograph myself covered in blisters, integrating my physical discomfort with scans of oak trees. Through collage my work began to evolve from a trans body in nature, to a trans body as nature. The cutting away is not a removal, but highlighting certain parts of my body I still grapple with.  

I invite the viewer to join me in my process, in the hope that they leave with a deeper permission to exist as a vital, celebrated (and also sometimes ugly, decomposing) part of the landscape that holds us all. 

Last June, in the middle of Pride month, I was verbally assaulted in my neighborhood.  Stopped mid stride by a man, then yelled at for a block and a half to “get that festival bullshit” away from his property.  He  was half a foot taller and 100 lbs heavier than me, but I was the threat to him at that moment,  while wearing my new pink jacket with sweet pea blossoms tucked into the buttonholes.  To those coded as queer out in the world, this is not a unique experience.  It’s par for the course when going outside for many, especially trans femmes of color. I was frustrated, angry at the parts of myself that were shaken, for not having a thicker skin, for being bothered, scared, at such a brief and yet charged encounter.  There was a palpable dissonance of relief that things didn’t turn violent and the fury that a part of me believed this is what I deserved for how cute and happy I felt the day.  Stuck between an internalized pressure to be the levelheaded transmasculine saint, and the anger, fight response boiling inside me, I shut down and raged inward.  

These images are created using the found/discarded paper I was carrying at the time, the flowers poking out of my pocket, and the jacket I didn’t feel comfortable  wearing for three months.  This series is an alchemizing of these materials and emotions, dissolving the ideas of male/female, monster/saint, safety/danger into something new that I don’t have words for yet but can exist in these collages.  

This project began as way  to witness  the truth of my gender expression and morphed into a celebration of myself, my power, my embracing trans identity. The photographic series , “As I Am”, evolved  out of my process of coming out as a trans man. These self-portraits and the process of creating them became a refuge from words that felt limiting and acted as a place to listen to the wisdom of my body. 

Historically, photography is a medium that has been associated with capturing reality/truth. Not everyone has been written into the stories of our history. As trans existence and experiences are continually scrutinized, questioned, erased, our cultural reality can disappear..  with my photograph of myself I to make the  multitude of my experiences visible and validated. Self-portraiture and time are the means with which I am able to look at myself and tease apart truth from an imposed binary gender system in dominant culture that seeks to tell me my existence is unnatural.

Body postures, colors, symbols, emotions, objects are gendered in this culture from the moment of birth, imposed on humans in accord with genitalia. My images challenge these gender norms, while seeking new possibilities of existence through the dynamic tension of contradiction. Through contradictions new paths open for me to know what is  possible.

Each photograph has a span of time between printing and completion. As time passes for each photograph, the narrative I started with changes. Depending on the needs of each portrait I add on with gold leaf, paper, paint and objects, transforming the original image, allowing the portrait to encompass the layers of my experience. With each addition to the portrait, I am blessing the full existence of my trans identity while  honoring the time it has taken me to arrive at this place of deepening self acceptance.