Hollis Hunter

I am passionate about activist art involving transgender rights and visibility. With a visual arts practice, I am able to convey my own narrative while also creating positive representation for the communities I am allied with. The work I create addresses questions about the challenges of LGBTQ+ representation. Transfeminist activism paired with visual arts is powerful for navigating our precarious sociopolitical climate.

I consider figurative painting and sculpture to be strong mediums for exploring the politics of trans and queer identity, bodies, and representation. In both mediums, I take liberties with abstraction: expressive gestural marks and arbitrary colour are more important to my work than photo-realism. By creating paintings and sculptures of people, I am able to challenge the perceived authenticity of photographs and address assumptions about what certain bodies or identities look like.

My current work adapts images of queer-coded figures from mainstream media, and personal photographs of local community members. Mass media images of masculine-coded bodies and mass-manufactured toy dolls allows for the deconstruction of social ideas about sex, gender, and sexuality. This process creates a counternarrative to the representation of gender and sexual identity in media. My feelings of vulnerability while searching for intimacy heavily influence my work, which reflects my choice of imagery.