JAY MICHELLE ELIZONDO

Artist Statement

My work is a love letter to my memories, gender transition, family and the pop icons that have carried me through. A deployment of these iconographies is a deployment of the self. 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 of home and my desire to amend it. In attempting to heal my inner child, I reimagine a girlhood that sadly will never truly be mine. I emulate models of femininity outside of my reality. I escape into a feminine-fantasy as an act of survival from the fear and shame I felt as a trans adolescent.

My works cumulatively create my portrait, blending video, photography, drawing, and painting. I render with painstaking detail until I’ve reached a photo-realistic image as a means to nurture and hold the little trans girl inside me. Some of my portraits show vulnerability and tenderness by displaying the trauma of my trans adolescence through greyscale and censorship. Others are rendered through rose-tinted glasses by drenching them in the girly outfits, candy-coated pinks and vibrant backgrounds I longed for in my childhood. My self-portraits act as a political memoir, seducing the viewer into visceral and intimate confrontations with my trans body.

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