My work uses photography and collage to destabilize my own body and the built environment I move through. When photographing myself, I manipulate and contort my anatomy to produce abject, unfamiliar forms. In exterior spaces I am drawn to rigid, harshly lit structures that echo this tension. Later, I construct my collages by tracing directional energy across images, allowing movement and visual force to guide an organic flow through each composition. The resulting works channel the introspective curiosity, anxious dissonance, and profound beauty inherent to inhabiting a queer body.
I maintain a significant delay between photographing and composing, allowing images to remain dormant for years. This distance between making pictures and collaging them mirrors the slow, nonlinear nature of healing after emotional trauma. Beginning in response to the death of my older sister when I was seventeen, this process continues to examine fracture, mutation, and healing after immense turmoil. The final compositions reflect a ruptured experience of life in which perception is unreliable, identity is fluid, and meaning emerges through accumulation and perseverance rather than resolution or closure.
J (b. 2000, New York)
sinwithoutgod@gmail.com