On Jay Lynn Gomez’s Tableaux About Transitioning

A model of this essay initially appeared in Reframed, the Artwork in America publication about artwork that surprises us and works that get us labored up. Join right here to obtain it each Thursday.

Who’s Jay Lynn Gomez? That query animates the artist’s present exhibition at P.P.O.W in New York, and the reply is a bit sophisticated, ever evolving. Titled “Below Development” and on view by means of June 15, the present poignantly and earnestly depicts Gomez’s gender transition—a course of encumbered by the truth that Gomez had already achieved some art-world acclaim utilizing her former title, having exhibited in main group reveals like “¡Printing the Revolution! The Rise and Affect of Chicano Graphics, 1965 to Now” on the Smithsonian American Artwork Museum and “Day Jobs” on the Blanton Museum of Artwork.

In 30 some work and mixed-media works, a lot of them self-portraits, we see Gomez contending along with her new life. We see her newly topic to the leering gaze of building staff, and getting accosted by a white girl for utilizing the ladies’s toilet at Fenway Park. Elsewhere, in one of many present’s greatest works, a 2024 canvas titled I’m a piece in progress, we see Gomez as her former male self, portray a imaginative and prescient of a lady of her personal making, as she now desires to be seen. Subsequent to her palette and brushes, we see her gender-affirming drugs. Behind him a lady, the artist’s mom, dusts off certainly one of Gomez’s earlier works.

Earlier this yr, the artist started portray scenes from her transition straight onto her hormone packaging. The earliest work from this sequence is titled shot day (all works 2024); it’s a tender self-portrait displaying the artist injecting her stomach with hormones. The piece, measuring simply over 3 by 6 inches, is painted straight onto the flattened field of Gomez’s Estradiol valerate, her authorized title partially seen. This work joins a few dozen different small drawings of Gomez at numerous phases in her life, all painted on her hormone packaging. This use of discovered cardboard remembers an earlier sequence, begun in 2013, through which Gomez painted Latinx home staff—gardeners tending to manicured lawns, pool cleaners fishing for leaves—onto journal pages displaying lovely mansions that they maintain pristine; Gomez later scaled these drawings as much as David Hockney-esque work. Her goal then as now could be to point out those that have been marginalized or rendered invisible.

In “Below Development,” she offers her personal technique of transitioning a uncommon form of visibility, carving a great picture of herself whereas additionally grappling with how the world sees her. However she doesn’t cease there: she additionally honors the big contributions that trans ladies of colour have made towards civil rights for queer individuals. These ladies have typically been, till lately, deliberately erased from historical past; Gomez pays homage to some in a monumental work titled Trans ladies of colour that features Sylvia Rivera, Cecilia Gentili, and Erotica Divine.

However visibility has its downsides. Gomez confronts them in Day by day I stroll exterior is a leap of Religion (Strolling with Alok), which reveals the artist in a black bra, staring within the mirror as she shaves her higher lip. Behind her, a canary flies out of a gold cage, and in a single nook Gomez has kissed the canvas with a pair of a bright-red lips. Within the foreground is Alok, a gender non-conforming poet and comic who has been a mentor to Gomez throughout her transition. The 2 are surrounded by leering building staff and indicators studying ROAD CLOSED and DETOUR. There’s stress on this scene: just like the missed laborers of their excessive visibility orange, Gomez and Alok seem each hyper-visible, and but invisible, too.

That portray is untethered to any actual area: as an alternative, the figures float in a purple void. Gomez makes use of purples typically, maybe referencing the swirling collectively of the colours of the trans flag (pink, cyan, and white), and even the spectrum of hues in a bruise: a bruise on the web site of hormone injection; a bruise from hemophilia, a situation Gomez has; a bruise that refers back to the violence that trans ladies of colour typically face, whether or not from lovers, from johns, and even from catcalling building staff.

Behind the exhibition, there’s a sculptural intervention. There, Gomez has put in a chain-link fence coated by a inexperienced tarp, with diagrams of her facial feminization and breast augmentation surgical procedures painted onto the floor. Surrounding these diagrams are outlines of butterflies: the last word image of transformation. An indication on the ground warns: “WERK ZONE.” Close by, Gomez has devoted a poem to her buddy Winter Camilla Rose—additionally depicted in a leisurely odalisque portrait—about “a journey with no information / with no finish.”