Artist Statement

For this self-portrait collage, I used magazine scraps to craft a cohesive image that paradoxically lacks cohesion due to the displacement of colors within and outside my body. Therefore, I am playing with the idea of deconstruction by taking a whole image and ripping it apart so that it lacks legibility within the overall work. In this way, the very process of creating the collage ties into its theme—gender as a social construction. 

The monochrome blue of my shirt expresses the masculinity forced upon my person by a gendered culture, contrasting the triadic color scheme that breaks free–or “glitches–from my body. In this glitched space, masculinity, femininity, and neutrality can interact freely
 

My final collage expresses two themes integral to my daily existence—gender and digital spaces. By weaving these two themes together within the idea of construction and deconstruction, I have expressed how society confines bodies to a rigid gender binary compared to how the digital world distorts and warps such conceptions, offering a more nuanced view of how masculinity, femininity, and neutrality interact rather than existing in isolation.