hair piece
The form, texture, and volume of hair has become the vehicle through which masculinity is expressed in many of today’s sexual subcultures. For queer people, hair can represent anything from the masculinity typically denied them to a personal revolt against misogynistic and/or normative ideals of “beauty” that a body is supposed to meet. For trans individuals, the amount of hair one has can be a bridge towards the body type that is more in line with who they are. Hair has become a visual index of virility, beauty, and sexuality.
My ink drawings are formal explorations of these concepts through decontextualized images of natural body hair. In these drawings, I take images from the Internet and emphasize only the hair, rendering each follicular growth in fine ink strokes. When the original context of the body is removed, the hairs become a figurative abstraction. No longer recognizable by the original subject’s identity or the hair’s anatomical location on the body, these images become meditations on gender, sexuality, and the body.
12"x17.5". Ongoing.
