Thesis Exhibition: March 20-23 

Reception: March 22, 6-8 pm 

 
Self Portrait as a Sinner, 2023, oil on canvas, 48" x 60”. 
 

Lamentation, 2023, oil on canvas, 24" x 36". 

Artist Statement 

To be transsexual is to be a mirror. 

The moment that you gaze at a transexual and the transexual gazes back is an existential moment. 

Locking eyes with a gender-fugitive hurtles you into a non-consensual (dis)embodiment situation. The only way out is to commit a moment of espionage against your own sex, to terrorize your own stability, to admit that you are just as constructed as I am. 

My work is about our relationship. The canvas is the mediator of perception, and I who paint the canvas am the arbiter of your relationality. You, through your gaze, become me, through the surface that we share. Perhaps the distinction between trans and not trans becomes eliminated through the slight offset of mirrored parallels. And then, we barrel toward an unbecoming that serves to unfix us, and in doing so, unshackle us from the static nature of our no-past, no-future, reality. Instead, we can become a flurry of non-gender, bursting into futurity. 

More information about Elliot Engles at https://www.elliotengles.com/