Hey Remember When I Had a Rat Tail

Tyza Stewart

Opening 07.06.18 6-8pm
Artist Talks 29.06.18 6-7pm

Ambiguously gendered selves, depicted in oil paint and video. Images adjusted to modify and complicate perceptions of my gender, to disrupt gender-normative readings of my life, or frustrate a viewers ability to scrutinise me.

Institute of Maggot Art (2016) combines security camera footage of myself moving through the Institute of Modern Art with video of myself caring for rat-tailed maggots, to consider connections between the maggots status within capitalism and my own. Similarly I used the video profile Dense Plant Scenes (2014) to think about interactions I’ve had with art institutions, journalists, and people who meet me after seeing my artwork.

Recent paintings, in Hey Remember When I Had a Rat Tail, are informed by current public interest in ‘transgender visibility’. In contexts such as mainstream media, trans visibility can require trans and gender diverse people to disclose specific information about their bodies and lives in line with an archetypal narrative, and to strive for cisgender ideals. Diverse gender identities are often reduced to a depoliticised stereotype that reinforces binary gender. In this form, trans visibility can become a tool to control and limit (discussion of) queer experiences of gender. I consider possibilities of resisting such control through ambiguity and multiplicity.