Jay Michelle Elizondo, Paper Doll (Dress-Up), 2026. 10.5 x 14 in. Paper cut-out. Edition of 5 + 2 AP.
JAY MICHELLE ELIZONDO
Artist Statement
My work is an invitation to my intimate, unfiltered world, where, as a transgender woman, I transform complex emotions around nostalgia, home, family, and traumatic childhood experiences. I create a reality I couldn’t access. I blend video, photography, drawing, painting, and archival material to construct that reality. Much of my work is born out of hurt; markers of memory in emotional times. I manipulate that hurt through a constant tension between my strained nostalgia for home and my desire to amend it. Grief warps time, encompassing past, present, and future. Moving through it, I protect my inner child by redacting her deadname in archival footage and continuing to emulate women in pop culture as she did. As an adult, I boldly display my trans body in defiance of society’s obsession with it. A blend of innocence and decadence; life and art intertwined. The tension between what I reveal and withhold plays a nuanced, vital role in my work. Visibility is important, but so is self-preservation. The real power lies in what I keep private.
My body has always centered my work. Some depictions are tender acts of vulnerability, rendered with painstaking detail until I reach a softer, photo-realistic image to nurture and hold my inner trans child with slow care. Others are bold expressions of resistance rendered through rose-tinted glasses; drenched in the hyper-feminine outfits, candy-coated pinks, and vibrant backgrounds I longed for in childhood. Every detail echoes my life’s trials, tribulations, and triumphs.
Attempting to heal my inner child, I reimagine a girlhood that sadly will never be mine. I do so through emulation, where fantasy meets stark reality. I perform models of femininity outside my own— facsimiles of my mother, grandmother, and sister, alongside the women in pop culture who shaped me. A deployment of these iconographies is a deployment of the self. By emulating them I achieve a more raw, honest expression, escaping into a feminine-fantasy as an act of survival from the fear and shame I felt as a trans adolescent. My self-portraits act as a political memoir, seducing the viewer into visceral confrontations with my trans body.