Camouflaged

Camouflaged considers how masculinities are formed and performed.

My current project, Camouflaged, explores my patriarchal lineage to investigate how masculinities are formed and performed. The project draws parallels between the history of photography and the patriarchal culture I was raised within. Through this lens, the series asks how transmasculine identities navigate the pressure to either assimilate into dominant cultural structures or resist them entirely. 

Throughout the photographic series, I reflect on the patriarchal structures I was raised within to explore my relationship with masculinity. I use personal artifacts such as hair, hunting trophies, testosterone, and family photographs to trace my relationships and history. Using a dye-sublimation printing process, I print photographs onto mesh and transparent fabric, using it as material to create in-camera collages. The photographs printed on the fabric represent environments I have inhabited. I am interested in how these fabrics visually reference camouflage, which is designed to be uniform and obstruct legibility, but instead they communicate a specificity. I use the transparency of each material to layer the photographic fabrics to create heavily assembled collages that reveal their own construction. Through this practice, I am exploring the limitations of visibility. 

In making each portrait, I undergo transformations to question how I dismantle, uphold, or complicate the patriarchal ideologies embedded within American culture. Using self-camouflaging techniques borrowed from military and hunting culture, I investigate the visibility of my identity as a transmasculine person, exploring the constraints of assimilation and imagining new possibilities for masculinity. Rather than deploy camouflage as a tool to disappear into an environment, I use it to become hypervisible, confronting the viewer with the expectations and limitations placed on gender.