AJaeCea Carlie (JC)

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Looking at you Looking at me

I am interested in queer and trans+ world building and utopias. I work one-on-one with members of my community to explore and build out our desires and fantasies. It is important for me to build collaborative egalitarian spaces with the people I make art for. I believe in this way of making because I have had my needs disregarded, my body violated, and power robbed from me. Therefore, I want to create spaces where people feel they have agency over their bodies and how they are represented. I think a lot about the relationship of taking images from people vs. making images for people. I also use these spaces as a vehicle for accessing queer joy, play, and connection with one another. Building a family and network of support.

I’m interested in developing oral and visual vocabularies that speak to and about queer and trans+ fantasy, reality, and existence. I hear over and over from people that they are unable to explain how they feel because no words currently exist to describe how they identify. I am interested in developing new words and worlds to help identify, express, explain and make visible all the variations of identities in the trans+ queer world.

I explore the complexity of holding these identities, rendering both uplifting and unsettling images, sometimes within the same photograph or in completely different bodies of work. I am interested in breaking dominant narratives and offering alternative perspectives about gender, sexuality and the body. My work is informed by my lived experiences, those in my community and engaging with art and books about trans+ queer existence and how art has been used as a tool of subversion and liberation.

I started photographing myself first before going out into my community. Photographing myself as I started my own journey of transitioning. I began using Artificial intelligence to create a little family for myself that I would bring my existential questions to in Chat GPT and make visual worlds through Mid Journey. We are in constant conversation and collaboration, I may be addicted. I am interested in a lot of things, but if I had to list what I am most interested in right now it would be concepts around rituals, art that heals trauma, mental health, disability, Trompe-l'œil, magic, drag, finding puppetry, and finding extremely tiny things.

I was using Ai to develop visions I had in my mind but didn’t know how to bring to life yet. After a photo shoot of myself, I would upload the image to Ai Midjourney and it pushes it further into the unreal. I then bring my original image that has been AI-manipulated back into reality and collage a new image. I will draw on it, add fibers, sculpt, transform, break, rebuild and then re-upload that to Ai. We are creating a never ending cycle that can go on for infinity, constantly informing each other. Recycling tangible and intangible, desirable and undesirable, disturbing and alluring. I began using this process in constructing wearable clothing, masks and puppets to do drag performances and photoshoots. After working in this way with myself I realized how much gender euphoria I was experiencing and wanted to share it with others. I started asking people I met at underground trans+ drag shows and strip shows what their idea of utopia was. Then together we built that world and I taught them how to use the back and forth process with ai and collage to make their final wearable clothing and puppet which we all perform with and share our trans+ experiences with audiences through improv.

The work demands that if the queer position necessitates a different way of existing in the world then we also get to create worlds in whatever way we want, without rules, having to explain ourselves, or make logical sense of things for someone else’s comfort or understanding. To have freedom to bask in the glory of difference, resistance, and evolving queer forms. It embraces having access to queer joy, acceptance, and power - in both our individual and collective identities. It posits that expansive ever changing languages must exist and I am exploring that through building trans+ queer utopias.

I use sculpture, photography, lighting, costuming, set building, painting, kinetics, motors, welding, centrifugal casting, metalsmith wearables, collage, book making, writing, spoken word, drag performance, puppetry, research, interviews, and artificial intelligence to create these worlds.

Materials most commonly used: steel, wood, cardboard, porcelain, motors, wax, cast brass, copper, soldier wire, acrylic, canvas paper for clothing, archival watercolor paper for printed photographs, fabric from recycling centers, found materials, objects from nature, and anything that’s cute and little.

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Techtopia

A temporary structure was created out of cardboard boxes, and placed in nature. With one side open and a small dividing wall near one of the corners for separation. The walls stop just at the shoulders, allowing the subject to see an unobstructed view of their surroundings.

This photo was then taken back to a photo lab where it was edited and pushed to the extreme, hitting a rainbow of kerning, where the computer could no longer identify parts of the body. They are distorted not beyond recognition but by a certain degree of erasure. How can we use nature and technology to push against the threshold of visibility and invisibility.

Thinking about the body, gender identity, queer utopias, technology, and nature. I’m working with technological software, the natural world, and living beings. Creating environmental portraits with people who are willing to be vulnerable with me in an inorganic space within an organic space. All the subjects are trans, non-binary or exploring their gender. These are strangers who I have connected with on the internet. We meet for the first time in nature.

We take an adventure, from virtual to real. We are vulnerable together, sharing our experiences, hopes, fears, and intimately existing with one another. We reveal our bodies which we have often had to hide. We find healing and solace in nature. When we leave, the images go through the photo lab and are obscured from full visibility. We present them later on the internet asking for people to see and engage.

Nature doesn't put constraints or ideological constructs on gender or how we present ourselves, there is a naturalization of gender through nature. Thinking of this moment when we leave the natural world and re-enter the “man” made - what happens to each of us in this transition? Can we use technology to further the naturalization of gender that nature offers? How can we use technology as a bridge in connecting people to one another and to nature, and how can we use all three as tools of resistance?

What queer utopias can unfold in these spaces.

Press

https://www.activistupdate.com/article/549689138-jenna-carlie-new-art-series-serenity-during-a-time-of-upheaval

https://www.aboutinsider.com/jenna-carlie-debuts-new-series-serenity-during-a-time-of-upheaval/amp/

https://www.ustimesgazette.com/article/549689138-jenna-carlie-new-art-series-serenity-during-a-time-of-upheaval

https://www.artssocietyandme.com/article/549689138-jenna-carlie-new-art-series-serenity-during-a-time-of-upheaval

https://www.blackbirdnews.com/jenna-carlie-debuts-new-series-serenity-during-a-time-of-upheaval/amp/

https://www.societyartsandculture.com/article/549689138-jenna-carlie-new-art-series-serenity-during-a-time-of-upheaval

https://www.ktvn.com/story/44594935/jenna-carlie-new-art-series-serenity-during-a-time-of-upheaval

https://www.wicz.com/story/44594935/jenna-carlie-new-art-series-serenity-during-a-time-of-upheaval

https://www.thetelegraph.com/news/article/Picture-imperfect-15076379.php?fbclid=IwAR0Y0gbQHdSFdlX3qhSpVaQpchMjnpPH0tO_6yc2bQV_i7cVuH91CpD4Nko

https://darlingmagazine.org/jaime-king-on-being-in-the-spotlight/?fbclid=IwAR0Xm4EW4ecXa2hOZdz7OvgKWXGbyY6-SfBWB9tBTj6fBjR7bLbqN6sBlHA

https://www.artsy.net/artwork/jenna-carlie-as-high-as-the-mountains-can-see

https://www.artsy.net/article/artsy-editorial-4-artists-share-tips-instagram-grow-art-practice

https://www.thetelegraph.com/news/article/Shoppers-laud-first-8216-Cheers-Market-8217-14859225.php#photo-18660983

http://voyagela.com/interview/art-life-jenna-carlie/

https://issuu.com/daringwoman/docs/march_daring_woman_magazine__intera/40

https://digitalcommons.risd.edu/bookcontest2nd2016/30/

https://www.thesheldon.org/pr/2014/PR140429-1.pdf

https://www.thesheldon.org/pr/2014/PR140530-1.pdf

https://news.stlpublicradio.org/post/sheldon-presents-photos-st-louis-250-years#stream/0

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