transevangelist blue, 2024

multimedia installation (film projection, cyanotype on silk, pigment print, paper clay chromosome sculptures, printed tract media) & performance piece

hosted by Project 308 Gallery, North Tonawanda, NY with partial support from the University at Buffalo Department of Art.

abridged Abstract

“Transevangelist blue” is a posthumanist examination of relationships between gender queering, Christian Fundamentalism, and Western gender constructs, serving as an interpretation of trans spirit that takes form in satirical Transgenderisme, an ideology and pseudo-religion that insists upon a transsexual lens for self-discovery, regardless of one’s relationship to gender. Transgenderisme is a form of spirituality that stems from my experience growing up in a Southern Baptist church, delivered through photographs, sermons, and clown rituals by my performance persona, Sombre Tempête. Sombre is a transevangelical jester for a cisgender court, who draws parallels between cabaret, jesus mimes, church leaders, and lived trans experiences, using his role as an outsider to mock the binary and its perpetrators and draw the viewer into the phantasmagorical universe he is from, where gender is as simple as ripples of water and diffractions of light. 

Sombre uses the magic and humor of the clown as a mode of critique. Binary-coded materials such as sex chromosomes and gender reveal artifacts are obscured and subverted through the Othering that is inherent to the court jester. This work investigates the means in which jesters subvert order and disrupt patterns within society, juxtaposing the ways in which queer, specifically intersex bodies, are estranged from society in a similar fashion. The color blue is held as primordial knowledge from ‘the deep’, presented through cyanotype. Sombre walks this tightrope of wielding/queering the power of a transformation and invoking the tragicomic nature of late stage Christian hegemony. 

all rights (c) church de transgenderime, 2024-