SKY SYZYGY
Artist Statement
I am a white, trans, multidisciplinary artist, a racial and gender justice trainer and facilitator, and an archivist. My work focuses attention on gestures of resistance, points of contact, and ideological forces. I use techniques of performance, documentary filmmaking, and printmaking—especially ways of recasting or playing with found and archival material—to collaborate with individuals and communities. My work looks beyond dominant narratives and histories to acknowledge and work with the people who are often in the background, and to focus attention on their work, lives, and labor. A central goal of my projects has been to find ways for collaborators to tell their stories in all their subtlety, ambiguity, and incompleteness.
Liberating Gender celebrates the art and activism of trans, Two-spirit, and nonbinary liberation activists and artists in North America during the 1960s-90s. The project centers on a growing, collectively-curated archive containing ephemera, poems, manuscripts, and other materials by trans* creators. The latest version of the archive can be browsed at gender.network. I believe that physicalizing histories of oppression and resistance is a powerful tool for doing the collective work of mourning and healing required to build new forms of solidarity. I want to see these pieces of trans* hirstory, to literally hold them in my hands. I want to restore some of the many trans* artists and activists who have been erased from art history and from the history of feminist, racial, and gender liberation movements of the 1970s.
As an A.I.R. Fellow in 2021 and the first openly trans New York Member of A.I.R., I am excited and inspired by the collective re-visioning that the gallery is undertaking as it enters its second semicentennial. I am incredibly grateful for the administrative and moral support I have received from Christian, Roxana, Elizabeth, Taylor, and others who continue to work behind the scenes to make this project and the feminist project of A.I.R. Gallery possible.