- Activism,
- Body,
- Book,
- Care,
- Community,
- Connection,
- Decolonization,
- Drawing,
- Embodied,
- Fun,
- Gender,
- Handmade,
- Home,
- Identity,
- Indigenous,
- Ink,
- Language,
- LGBTQ+,
- Material Practice,
- Multidisciplinary,
- Performance,
- Poetry,
- Political,
- Printmaking,
- Relationships,
- Slice of Life,
- Transition,
- Water & Ocean,
- Wood,
- Zine
Nothing is synthetic;
Ash Boan
See it On Campus: Level 1
In the sculpture room (D1359)
Visitor InfoMary Plumb Blade Award — Honourable Mention
Explorations of intimate materialities
A work pondering and exploring trans community, connection, and archiving, through relationships, history, caring, and methods of opacity.
The prints are meant to be given to other trans people throughout the exhibition, leaving gaps in their wake. This visualizes the way that each print is individual, and a world, in itself, and yet still never fully complete without the others. In each image, the trans subjects, even if on their own, are never alone. They are responding to or experience the result of histories of generations of other trans people, or being laid out for the next.
On the back of each print there is text, in different and repeating lines and combinations, meant only to be visible for the other trans people gifted a piece – or whoever they choose to bring into their life by sharing it.
In this work I play with formal conventions, breaking what conventions add no material worth to the work. I use formality to display how trans bodies and lives are worth taking up formal space, but dismissing it to display as well how our work doesn’t have to fit into formality to bring value. I am inspired by popular trans media and illustration, that operate, as it always has, outside of formal structures, and bring such warmth to our lives through being for each other, sharing with each other; sharing and celebrating our lives with each other.
By editioning these prints, I display again how each is an individual out of a many, always even unknowingly calling to each other. The method of letterpress allows a quantity that displays the vastness of our community, as well as displaying our repeating and shared, yet each a little different, experiences throughout history through the repetition-yet-always-slightly-different effect of letterpress.
This work was inspired by responding to the actively rising legislative oppression of trans people. It has become even more important to take archiving our histories in our own homes. I was searching through trans archives, hoping for inspiration to create a piece responding to my need to create an at-home archive. What I found was that a major source of importance in viewing a trans archive, was simply being able to see, and feel connection to, other trans people in history. To see not just proof that we have existed, but to see their faces, their love for each other, for themselves, their ways forward. These prints are meant to focus on trans connection now, as well as becoming an archive of us now.
Each print is meant to be a gift, a love letter, on its own to another trans person, and at the same time, it is clear that it is a part of a larger network of eachother.
On thinking about ideas of Land Back; how big change can seem impossible, but even things as impermeable as oceans and mountains are always changing.
This print, largely by accident, as well a part of my series of works depicting and discussing disconnection through my journey of learning Anishinaabemowin.
A book exploring my disconnection from Anishinaabe culture as a result of colonialism, through my journey of learning Anishinaabemowin.
The book has the few words I have been able to learn, as well as drawings of when I first learned the words, and materializations of those words in my life. Inside the bound pages are further writings about my journey learning Anishinaabemowin, and processing disconnection. This book was handed to a friend to cut open the pages.
A book ruminating on the beauties of sharing and friendships.
This book ponders generosity and connection as the historical and agiven condition of living; they function now as well, as a way of surviving despite and to spite capitalism.
Exploring the materialities of life and coping while witnessing the genocide in Gaza, while living in the imperial core.
A book displaying, celebrating, and centering trans masculine bodies and sexuality.
A pocket book, easy to hold with one hand.
