Words.
Project proposal for Stealing Masculinity.
My practice is in photo-based installation, performance and video/film production. I explore the sexual and social stigmatization of women, the body and queer subject. I dismantle socialized, role-defined, gender appropriate behavior and its signifiers. My previous work, including the exhibition "G.I.D.", has been an examination of the political implications of being a gender outlaw. I explore the profound personal choices surrounding self, gender and identity.
In exploring these themes I make use of non-traditional photo processes, pushing the boundaries of photography, showing layers of the subject. I employ double exposures, layers, blurring, scratching, text. I use these techniques to challenge the certainty or truth of photographs and their conventional authority as objective reality; I insert my self into the work. Art critic Paula Gustafson describes in Artichoke: “the magic Holman achieves is a palimpsest – like layering of words and photographs that evocatively express facets of sexual identity that might fall within the category of cross-dressing but is a much more subtle and undefined territory."1
An essential part of my work has been research into the historical and contemporary impact of gender inquiry and performance, which has been described in the writings of Jan Zita Grover, Leslie Feinberg, Kate Bornstein, Joan Nestle, and Daphne Scholinski. My work follows an aesthetic and cultural tradition ranging from Cecil Beaton to Catherine Opie and includes photographic work by Nina Levitt, Cindy Sherman, Del LaGrace Volcano, Hannah Wilke, Janine Antoni, and Yvonne Rainier.
Stealing Masculinity will be a circle of 12 life-sized Photographs of the subject/object: a transman (transsexual) undergoing the change from a female to a male body. I‘ll use one image from every two months of a three year transformation. The format is large, simple; a purposeful digression from my older techniques. I’m trespassing in the territory of the authoritative conventions of photography. In addition, I’ll construct 3 graphs (26”x32”) made up of colour transparencies of the same subject: appropriating and subverting the trappings of scientific narratives of gender. The subject is stealing masculinity and I am appropriating authority (stealing masculinity) to present it. (In my most recent work GenderStupid you can see me working in this way.)
The creative process includes, three years of monthly photographic documentation. Building frames for the transparencies, collecting written journal and voice samples.
I will further the examination of the sexual and social stigmatization of women, the body, and queer subject. I’ll examine the definition of a man’s body: does it necessitate visual proof of a penis? Will the male body be devalued because it comes from a female body, seen as not really a man? And if it is, what does that say about our Lacanian concept of lack and power? I’m also interested in the fluidity of self-definition regarding sexual orientation and the phobias that restrain it.
Decisions of women to transition into men are impacting every community. Through art, this work will further the dialogue about gender signifiers within minority representation.