There Were always priests around(by Emily, Rachel, and Joseph)
Recipient of the 2024 Thomas Reiss Memorial Award for graduate thesis work addressing humanitarian issues. Click here to see my 2025 TEDx Talk on “The Intersection of Gender & Art” referencing this piece.
The PieceMy MFA thesis was an interdisciplinary exploration of my queer and trans relationship to femininity, both how I was raised to view it in mainstream media as a child, and how it exists within my body as an adult. The project pairs a still photography series with an experimental hybrid documentary/narrative film in a gallery installation, using dovetailing narratives and visuals to push forward the central questions of my life:
What narrow idea of femininity have I always been chasing? And what truer self can I pursue now?
The photo series, titled There Were Always Priests Around, juxtaposes the mainstream images of feminine sexuality I was raised to simultaneously worship and fear with the so-called "Catholic guilt" of my parents' generation, where they were raised to have a reverent, but fearful relationship to God.
It calls upon America’s collective memories of the 50s/60s, when local priests would be casually invited to family gatherings and community events, and subverts them with the sexualized aesthetics of contemporary media. The series stages heightened, theatrical family photo album snapshots with modern lingerie models standing in where priests may have previously appeared.
The film, titled Emily, Rachel, and Joseph, further personalizes this exploration by turning the camera back on themself in a diaristic documentation of their experience making the installation. However, the film makes one central departure from the cinema verité style it imitates: all the scenes are scripted, with cis actress Rachel Caplan playing Joseph.
This gesture gives birth to the semi-fictional subject of the documentary, the titular “Emily," a hypothetical woman that exists in the liminal space between Rachel and Joseph.
The installation also features numerous set pieces and art objects, including a handmade frame for the video display designed to mimic a catholic triptych painting, a salvaged church pew, and multiple printed books.
