panoranima / spitting image :: [2011]

A landscape of large-scale digital images - both self-portraiture and folks from the queer community - that have been drawn back into to emphasize the imagined, the impossible, and the continually shifting and recreated parts of the body.

Panoranima/Spitting Image was exhibited at the National Queer Arts Festival: Queer it Yourself at SOMArts, San Francisco, in June 2011. The NQAF was curated by members of the Queer Cultural Center.

Queer bodies have long been sites of the extension of physical possibilities. We actualize this by pushing medical boundaries and broadening identity acceptance; we fantasize this in our style, our images of self-representation, our sex and our play.

Our bodies - the way we present them, imagine them, use them - are the locus point in how we seek to balance a healthy, sustainable living practice while immersed in modern culture, digital social networking and the pace of technological necessity. Rather than separate entirely from this culture, there is a level of working it to suit our needs and changing it to accept our desires without becoming commodified by it. The survival and growth of queer culture requires active participation in how we continually define and represent ourselves. This process facilitates exchange not as a consumer process, but as cross-pollination for both understanding and expanding our individual identities within a larger community.

What are the physical manifestation of how we, as a community, continue to push those boundaries? How do we see ourselves - not defined as "other," but as continually extending the limits of representation? How do we redefine ourselves while staying rooted to our histories and queer communities? How do we respond to, use, and challenge technology and medicalized views of the body? How do we test the limits of reality by fulfilling our fantasies?

This ongoing project seeks out a way to address these questions in the visual display, while inviting an exchange for participants to bring their own bodies and their own answers to these questions directly into the work.