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• 1 hochsmall.jpg 2019-04-04T23:58:52-07:00 Purgatory 13 plain 2024-12-20T06:45:55-08:00

  The two images displayed here are related. So I thought it best to address them together.

  When I began working on this first image, I based it on a phone conversation I had with someone in the USC counseling office. The health center requires you to set up a phone consultation before you can be referred to a therapists, and I have been thinking about seeing one since my dad died last year. At one point, she asked me if I had ever seen a therapist before. I replied, “when I was younger, after my mother died my father thought it was best to therapize us," then, “I also saw someone once in college, but then, after two sessions, realized I was bisexual and stopped going.” She then asked in response, “and do you still identify as bisexual?” I laughed a bit and said yes even though the question would later dig at me.
  
  It's a pretty benign thing to say, and I could have easily thought nothing of it, but there was something in the tone of her voice (and more flatly in the question itself) that implied the transience normally associated with my sexuality. And what I soon heard was: You’re a lesbian now right? Or maybe you gave that up? Naturally, I couldn’t see her asking someone else, “and do you still identify as gay?” And it pains me to admit that questions like this consistently bring me to a place of animosity, one that holds a grudge for those who use bisexuality as a step on the way to something more definitive, more “real.” And for those so obsessed with this definitive reality that they refuse to reckon with other possibilities—with the less dichotomous and more dimensional aspects of sexuality. Are you as gay/straight/masculine/feminine/human as you insist? The image is meant to engage the same feeling of calm disturbance the question originally inspired in me, while also picking up on the disruption of this kind of dimensional thinking. 

  
  For the second image, I chose to use the medium of collage. I wasn’t sure of my direction but after leafing through W Magazines from the late noughties, I decided to continue with my theme. The final image isn’t exactly what I would want, there are certain words, feelings, and photographs that are hard to find in old Ws, but I think it came together given the inherent constraints of the medium. I wanted to convey the feeling of a specific kind of systemic subjection that for the most part is not considered as such.
  
  When I was younger and coming to terms with myself, what bothered me the most about my new identity was the assumed slutty-ness that came with the title—to this day I remain at a physical distance from those I'm close to, to avoid the implications of this assumption. And, also, the way such assumptions barred me from the communities I was supposed to belong to. This denial of entry was also, however, a denial of existence and legitimacy—always barred from a final destination. Now, it is the resulting hamstrung quality of this liminality that irritates me the most. My attractions arrest me in a kind of purgatory, as if I’m caught in the way station of a confused adolescent mind. My sexuality lacks a seriousness—and I lack this seriousness by association. To an extent, this second image is both the cause of and response to the first. It is what brought the counselor to ask “and do you still identify as bisexual?” And, it is my response to her inanity, as I’ve come too far to not. I hope the image might display this schematically constructed purgatory and ask the viewer to consider it as more than a metaphorical place, and, rather, see it as a preventive space, one few dare to venture.