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William Foy, Leader-Telegram entertainment reporter
The piece:
“It’s part of a larger series that I started at the end of 2019. There’s about like 30 I made total. “In short I entered it to this exhibition because when I exhibit this work I either exhibit it on small prints on transparency paper or digitally on my website. So knowing this was a virtual exhibition I wanted to submit work that would translate well on a web platform. “But second to that, what I really wanted to do was to select work that felt relevant to the time, I mean the pandemic. “Since I started that series in 2019, come 2020 I did what I’ve seen a lot of folks do during lockdown and I reflected a lot, and specifically I was reflecting on my social transition from she/her pronouns to they/them pronouns. And then eventually being transgender nonbinary. “So that piece is kind of like this fragmented narrative, learning and unlearning, and my own self-discovery. Because all of the arrangements in the collages in that series, they’re scanned images of myself, and then I would rearrange them in Photoshop.” “I was really fortunate prior to the pandemic. I had been seeing a therapist for what was about two years. And we got to continue talking over the phone for a year, and I talked a lot about my gender identity. She listened to a lot of me working through that. That was both intense but a relief to explore that in private.” The pandemic: “What (the pandemic) literally caused me to do in my work — I made it a lot faster and more intuitively. And that was both because I wanted to document the uniqueness of the time. But I was also alongside trusting to embrace my impulses in making. “So the work I submitted to this show and the work I’m making now looks drastically different. The work I’m making now looks very similar to what is short clips of someone’s home video but through the lens of a fine artist. That’s been really fun. “But on a deeper level, COVID-19 brought my priorities back to my relationships with friends and family. I guess what I gathered: To show up to my loved ones I needed to show up to myself first. “So since the pandemic my work is far less visually ambiguous, and I find a lot more beauty in myself and in my life. “So I feel much more rooted in my goal to archive that for future generations to enjoy as well. But also through a queer lens.” Juror’s comment: “I chose this work as it allowed me or had me start to reexamine the perceived structure and balance of a human face in the way that it was segmented and reassembled.” Contact: 715-833-9214, william.foy@ecpc.com, @BillFoy1 on Twitter
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