(us)
(us) - an entity that grows up with so little to look forward to, in terms of knowing what we might look like or embody.(us) - who recreate carbon copies of empty promises of consumerism until we find ways to be liberated of this.(us) - who realise that within time, our aesthetics become parts of the mood boards of various trend forecasters - but only on the surface.We remain relevant as consumers.At worst, we are thought of as a trend.I seek to leave behind the constraints of all there was projected onto (us).-M’THEYDY is an attempt to unearth representation where there is none or where we can only speculate upon it.is an appropriation of bodies assuming the default positions of cis women as templates for thehistorically positioned, at-time relevant and generally thought of to be en vogue.In Chic Parisien we witness beauty in a plethora of facets.I see beauty as radical notion of rejecting the violence that comes from cis male reflections on our desirability. Basing our worth on our fuckability and further, our safety on how little gender ambiguous space we take up.Beauty as a fem_me weapon to reclaim a world that was never ours to begin with despite being the most glum place without us in it. Beauty as anger, as anxiety-filled walks down the streets, as feeble consolation and yet powerful survival kit.Excavations of identities, burrowing into the metaphorical flesh of the subject, into the layers ofreading, readability. Illustrations on paper as photographs in a magazine; no questions asked as to the subjectivity, the self.My artistic practice has always been about showing the possibilities of what-if’s.To many, the notion of there being more than two default options of being is nothing more thanfiction.Thus far, I have spent years in the arts, making sure I illustrate this assumed fiction as the reality it is - has always been.What's most thrilling to me about painting is that it keeps me curious.I don't want to understand what’s happening on the canvas, I want to discover what will be taking place.Painting is weaving possibilities. The same way transgender people birth themselves from the ashes of their previous lives, paintings can be constructed from things that lay below.
