Title: Leaking Screens

Artist: Amelia McClure

Materials / Medium: Digital art, Medibang Paint program

Artist Statement: I am frustrated with social media algorithms pushing sexually harassing comments to the forefront of comment sections, especially on women's accounts. Seeing these comments makes me feel dirty and terrible. I can only imagine how the person who owns the page feels when they read them.

Title: cracks

Artist: Maia Foster-O'Neal

Materials / Medium: Digitally drawn, printed on paper, folded and stapled

Artist Statement:

I am a Lewis & Clark College alumna and former Gender Studies Symposium co-chair, currently studying sequential art at the Center for Cartoon Studies in White River Junction, Vermont. In this gallery, I offer you two very different comics, which both explore bodies and brains but from two pretty different angles. Cracks is straightforwardly autobiographical, reflecting on my history of dysphoria, experience with top surgery, and meditations on what it means for my gender identity. Entangled is a much more unsettling experimental comic, about dysphoria, neurodivergence, fungi, and the horror of existing in a human(?) body.

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 comics is one of the most effective tools I have to affirm myself as I navigate the complexities of my own embodied existence. When I first began posting my journal comics – intensely introspective, often idiosyncratic, a little goofy – online, I was stunned at how many people reached out to tell me that they recognized 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, a way for me to tell my own story to myself, has transformed into a source of deep human connection, a space of possibility and transcendence. This past year, I have been expanding into fiction too, as an alternate route for telling truthful stories. If you, too, resonate with my comics: I’ll meet you with a light and a story somewhere on the road, fellow traveler.

Title: Shaping Identity: Navigating Social Constructs in a Rubik’s World

Artist: Miranda T. Caba Solano

Materials / Medium: Procreate

Artist Statement: "Shaping Identity: Navigating Social Constructs in a Rubik's World" delves into the complexities of self-discovery amidst societal pressures. This striking piece captures the essence of a human figure with a head transformed into a Rubik's cube, symbolizing the intricate puzzle of identity. The hands surrounding the figure represent external forces shaping and influencing one's sense of self, mirroring the constant tug-of-war between personal authenticity and societal expectations.

This artwork serves as a reflection of my deep contemplation on the fluid nature of identity and the challenges individuals face in understanding and defining themselves within a world driven by conformity. The Rubik's cube motif signifies the enigmatic and ever-changing facets of one's identity, while the surroundings hands symbolizes the external influences that often dictate how one should perceive oneself.

Through this piece, I invite the audience to ponder upon questions surrounding self-discovery, societal norms, and the struggle to maintain individuality in a world that often impose rigid definitions of identity. The hope is for viewers to engage in introspection and consider the complexities of personal identity, Prompting discussions on the impact of societal constructs on individual self-perception. Ultimately, "Shaping Identity: Navigating Social Constructs in a Rubik's World" challenges viewers to unravel the layers of societal influences and embrace the journey of self-discovery with empathy and understanding.

Title: In den Staaten

Artist: Nuria Nimue Kiesebrink-Pareick

Materials / Medium: Oil on canvas

Title: It’s My Fucking House

Artist: Sienna Morell-Grant

Materials / Medium: Watercolor and pen

Artist Statement: This piece is meant to remind the audience of a brothel in the early 1900’s: but instead of being a place where women are selling themselves for male interests, the women have taken over. Taken ownership of their sexuality, their perceived promiscuity. It’s their house, their bodies, and they’re going to have the sensual fun that is so characteristic of femininity and women friendships, through emboldened, brazen, naked wildness.

Title: Photograms

Artist: Rosie Gurnee

Materials / Medium: RC paper, light, various found objects

Artist Statement: The ideas for these photograms were inspired by the final line of Kristin Chang’s poem entitled “Churching”; it reads “Godhood is just like girlhood: a begging to be believed.” These photograms, aka ‘camera-less’ photos are created by placing objects on top of light sensitive paper which is then exposed to light and developed in the darkroom. I wanted to combine religious motifs with representations of womanhood: my ideas surrounded the themes of nature, vulnerability, power, rage, beauty, objectification, innocence, obedience, lineage, divinity, solidarity, idolatry, and femininity. This work eventually became a portrait series which utilized some of the same motifs and themes.

Title: Still life of Mason

Artist: Jess O’Farrell

Materials / Medium: Mezzotint print on paper

Artist Statement: This piece is a part of a series of still lifes created in collaboration with people within the LGBTQ+ community. Still life’s within the context of art history are depictions of complex symbolism and allegory. Representations of life, death and decay, wealth, or a person's trade can all be displayed within objects on a table. Our possessions have meaning and are artifacts of who we are, our personalities, our interests, our queerness. I asked people within my community to bring objects that embody and represent their queerness. Art history isn’t explicitly queer, it’s covert, hidden behind symbolism you have to be privy to to understand. By using historical processes and composition I’m hoping to recontextualize queerness within art history.

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Title: SONGS I WOULD WRITE IF I HAD A BAND (EXCERPTS)

Artist: Ella Martini

Materials / Medium: Collage, Sharpie, laser printer

Artist Statement: My name is Ella and I’m a girl punk from tumblr.com. I say this because SONGS I WOULD WRITE IF I HAD A BAND is a quasi-historical account of my experience growing up as a punk girl on the internet, one set of hands in an army of gender anarchists carving out a space for ourselves between a world that manufactures girlhood insecurity and a punk subculture that hates young women.

Punk’s longstanding masculine bias infantilizes and vilifies everything that Teen Girls (as a discursive construct) represent in our culture—shallowness, frivolity, passivity, “fitting in”, the mainstream. It does so to establish its own credibility and value, using ME, the young teen fangirl, as its rhetorical punching bag. It says that I exist to take hits so the boys can feel tougher and cooler. And yet, in spite of this overt hostility toward me and my friends, I loved punk. I loved pop punk. I loved emo bands. I loved how sturdy and imposing I felt in combat boots, even though my gender always left me feeling a step removed from the “real” punks (the boys who mosh). Eventually I even grew to love my own complicated position within the subculture—which, because my body and age made me a target for violence, I engaged with mostly online.

SONGS explores what it’s like to participate in contemporary rock-fan culture as someone socialized female. I write for anyone whose identity, body, or lived experience has ever made them feel like a punk outsider. We are united, we are redefining what it means to be punk, and we are taking over. I love you all.

Title: Libations

Artist: Zoë Steele

Materials / Medium: Oil on canvas