Senior Thesis: Identity, Mental Health, and Gender

What does it mean to know yourself? As someone who has navigated the complexities of identity, mental health, gender, and sexuality, I've found that the answer is never clear-cut. My work explores these intersections through a raw, multifaceted lens—blending film, painting, drawing, and printmaking to provoke more profound thought and invite the viewer into self-discovery. I am drawn to spaces where identities become fluid and multifarious, societal labels clash with personal experience, and vulnerability becomes strength.

Growing up, I struggled with the pressures of gender expectations and mental health struggles that pushed me to question what I had been taught to believe about myself. In my art, I document these struggles––a space for reflecting on identity as a personal journey and social construct. My self-portraits explore the tension between masculinity and femininity: a complexity in embracing both sides of myself within a world that most often demands rigidity. Through my paintings and digital works, I turn the gaze back on those accustomed to categorizing and labeling, urging the viewer to confront their assumptions.

In my thesis work, I merge personal reflection with broader cultural commentary, using art to capture the moments when I've felt both fragmented and whole. My film is a documentary on depersonalization, both the self-altering with time and the conversation between past and present, myself. In this respect, I will merge archival footage, interviews with family and friends, and interior personal monologues to create visual metaphors to describe the complexity of mental health and identity. These moments—raw, vulnerable, and honest—invite the audience into the emotional landscape often hidden from view, challenging them to question what it means to hold onto your sense of self.

The prints I make—posed males in sensual, objectified poses—pushed traditional gender conventions full-on, countering one of society's most age-old gendered assumptions: that vulnerability is a female state. My female representations of dominant, traditional males pose a challenge, in similar terms, one of society's most deep-rooted assumptions: that one can ever only ever be feminine and feminine and conduct oneself in a submissive manner. My works unveil a new possibility for males and females: an enriched, multidimensional awareness of identity.

My works shatter a haven for observers to challenge one's assumptions and become empowered to reinterpret terms with and through which one's been constructed. I aspire for my work to make a lasting impact, not just as a series of images but as an encouragement to delve deeper into who we are and who we can become.