The idea of queerness being a newfound concept is preposterous. I have heard from people that the concept of queerness didn’t exist until the 1970s or even that it is somehow a modern-day ideology. This of course can easily be disproven by looking at the art throughout art history. Queer artists have been coding themselves in their artworks for centuries. Through study and research dedicated toward understanding what queer coding entails; I can attest that queer people have existed for as long as human beings could understand the idea of making a fire. This, of course, begs the question of why we now have an influx of queer identities.
The sudden “boom” of queer identities isn’t due to the idea of queerness somehow being new, but rather the evolution of language and the understanding of queer identities. It’s not that queerness is a hip or trendy idea, but that there is now more diversity included in the LGBTQIA+ community. This is where I have found the true inspiration for this body of work.
Throughout my research, I have found that there is specific iconography (symbols) that queer people have come to claim as their own for centuries. For instance, roses we understand these flowers to be the flowers of passion, and love and quite commonly associated with romance. However, it was common practice that samurai would occasionally present their comrades with a rose either a literal one or an illustration of one attached to letters of admiration to their generals and their comrades to show their affection toward each other on and off the battlefield. Not necessarily a symbol of queerness in a sexual aspect but these examples of queer iconography and the subtlety and nuances of queerness is what has fueled my research.
I have always been a queer artist, ever since I heard the word gay when I was seven I knew that I wasn’t different, I was just gay. Little did I know that being gay or queer was quite different. My previous work has examined the queer experience, and how queerness represented itself in modern society as well as writing my thesis on my grandfather’s sexuality, (which I found out a few years ago that he did in fact “come out” to my gay uncle in the 1980s/1990s). All these instances were simply about my own experiences and identity within the queer community. But I wanted to turn the lens from myself to the people I was close to. Thus, I looked in on my chosen family. A group of individuals who I call my family even though we are not blood-related. It is a sacred thing for queer folk to have their chosen families, sometimes we don’t feel comfortable being ourselves around our own families, so having a group of chosen family is often much more freeing and authentic to our experiences.
Within my work, I invite my participants to freely express themselves as their own representations of their humanity and their queerness.
