Throughout the process and the work conducted over the course of last year, I have been thinking primarily about the concepts of visibility, concealment, and disguise through the lens of queer experience merged with classic taxi visual elements. These concepts are the intersection between the two, so to say, like a traffic intersection. Additionally, thought has been imbued about the ideas of commitment, return, revisiting, repetition, and uniformity.

Investigating how queer experience can be represented through taxi imagery and character towards the forming of a visual language, in which I fumble to learn where I sit on logistics of representing myself, I have created this character as the mending between my chosen concepts and visuals. An anthropomorphised Checker Cab taxi, dawning big cherry lips and blue eyes, is an extension of myself similar to Ebecho Muslimova’s character Fatebe, they are not just a character drawn in repetition – and possibly obsession – but also a persona. An extension and characterisation of experiences pertaining to my queer-being in a cishet world. As well, they are a representation of the tensions both shared and personal in the terms of being visible or of having visibility: the empowerment and danger, the responsibility and commodification. Big red lips and blue eye shadow link - for me - to the world of drag performance and child-like play. My interest to merge and repeat my concepts and visuals stems from a motivation to practice commitment and repetition in my artistic practice. An attempt, too, in the intentional creation of a body of work.

As a queer and trans individual, not to mention also being racialized, visibility is fickle. It can be empowering: getting to see others I can relate to and to be seen by others that can relate to me, positive recognition. It can be educational: my body, presentation and being as a teaching tool to those curious and naively ignorant. On the opposition, it can also be dangerous: more recognition begets more harmful targeting. It can be reductive: ensued commodification and co-opting, labour with a quarter of the pay. For taxis, visibility is crucial: to be recognizable as a certain service, to be summoned and approached. Though who drives the taxi also holds power in deciding who is worthy of accessibility, in other words, power to perpetuate the relations of oppression. Overall, I have been meditating on the questions: What does it mean to “be visible”? Who are we visible to? How is visibility validated (by the masses or our individual selves)?  How we are represented and how that representation is configured through narrative is crucial to reception. How do I want to represent myself and through what narrative? Because I am making art that is calling attention to Trans visibility, I believe it is important to analyze how I am navigating the representations I am creating. I’m responsible for the representations of my experiences – they affect how I understand and view myself. In my work, I want to acknowledge where I’ve met struggle while also being cognizant of how I form meaning about myself, to give myself a positive feedback loop of reflecting and making through adding humor and playfulness. Visibility is a matter of representation. Representation is an interaction between viewer and viewee.

My chosen audience, who my works are speaking to and who it’s meant to be legible by, is my queer and trans* peers through a visual language compiled of reference to historical ephemera in queer and kink communities. In Queer bar scenes of 1960’s North America through to the 80’s, covert means of communication provided an avenue for safe communication and executing relations. In present day, the struggle with visibility and representation continues to dance between high recognition and high risk. Risk such as the commodification of individual identity for the benefit of an institution. My works reflect on the visibility of Queer experiences by imprinting elements of a personal visual identity – an anthropomorphized taxi character – onto ephemera selected from these Queer histories. These objects now linger in a digital age as nostalgic conventions offering experiences of mimetic engagement and potential return; covert forms of communication are always prevalent in times of particular restriction and oppression. For now, they are practices appropriated – used without the full knowledge of context – or practices well researched but primarily unrequited and novel. As artist-rendered commercial objects, influenced by Andy Warhol and Hal Fischer, they subvert the interaction of commodification and rather than calling for monetary exchange, they activate human connection in places where it is censored. To make visible in positive affirmation the subjects they embody.

Queer & Trans* bodies are taxis into the future, the avantgarde, force for change, ushers. A culmination of past histories connected through identity, not by blood or biological lineages. Yet also remain as entrance ways to the future, we inform what comes next – especially in terms of fashion and how it’s thought about – but it also seems as if we have become from the future, something beyond us that we don’t quite touch visually or physically, but we stem from and reference to. Both part of an endless evolution towards and a reflection of something not yet seen.