Blaise Willis
ECN-625 "Reaper" (2022)
In my early adulthood, I find myself returning to things I enjoyed as a chile, but from the other side of the gender binary. A major part of unpacking my identity as a trans woman has been confronting the memory of a childhood at odds with my current lived experience—which often both disorienting and upsetting—but there's a certain relief in finally understanding why I spent twenty years of my life feeling like absolute shit. Where do you go for comfort when your own body is the source of your nameless, silent suffering? The only solution is to get out. Sci-fi and fantasy media served as necessary escape pods for my younger self. My world existed in television shows, toys, and video games. Here, bodies are not burdens. Likewise in my art making I engender realities where I am no longer constrained by my form, an assemblage of incongruous, dysphoria-inducing anatomical parts. I am en empress, commanding armies of ruthless automatons. I am a model, walking the runway in zero gravity. I am an architect, constructing and populating cities in barren moons. I am the explorer cataloguing uncharted worlds and the goddess who birthed them from the void. this universe is mine, and I wield it as such—medium, genre, and certainly bodies are constantly in flux: morphine, mutating, distorting, shattering, recombining, evolving, becoming. Drawings are portals into cities on Ganymede, and being within materialize sculptural forms or self-replicate as relief prints. Photographs are corrupted, collaged, conjoined to moving mechanisms over scrawled writing on walls. These manifestations chronicle the struggle of claiming a transfeminine identity and the ensuing fallout of that realization, bridging the rift between escapism and reality that was ever--resent in my youth.