Jason Elizondo

Lives and works in Brooklyn, NY, USA

Artist statement

My work celebrates my desires and personal iconographies from early childhood. Love letters to my mother, pop culture icons, queer night life and the magic of movies. A deployment of these personal and pop symbols is actually a deployment of the self. Blending video, photography, performance and installation practices, I queer surfaces by drenching them in candy-coded colors, fabrics, and textures: shades of pink, crystals, sequins, glitter, vinyl and fur. The act of queering re-contextualizes them through a fantasy feminine outside the reality of their source material. As a survival strategy for the fear and shame I felt as a queer adolescent, I followed models of femininity outside of myself until I could find security in my own. My self-portraits act as a political memoir, seducing the viewer into visceral confrontations with the queer body. By paying homage to my queer influences through their symbols, I reclaim a feminine identity that I was deprived of in a traditional male constructed childhood— whereby I become my most authentic self by taking on the roles and characteristics of others.

Artwork