 So, as Juliana mentioned, I'm an artist who does mostly photo-based work, and the work I'm going to talk about today is Queer Icons, which is a printmaking, it's a portrait series that I've decided to work on, focusing, basically celebrating and focusing on the queer trans community of color. And the reason why I started this project is because I'd gone to art school and I was constantly going to art galleries, museums, and I was never seeing myself represented in any of these spaces, neither my community or anybody, so I decided that what I wanted to do is insert my narrative, or our narrative into that conversation. And so I started thinking about how I can do that. So I've been working in portraiture for a while now, and one of the things that I've always been attracted to is religious art. I mean, I was born, I mean, I was raised Catholic, and so religious art was my introduction to art first, you know, walking into church and seeing like these amazing murals of saints and encasing these beautiful like golden frames. So that's sort of what I was trying to incorporate into my work, and that's what I wanted to do here. So one of the ideas was basically, I always think of saints as like, oh, I could use this right, I always think of saints as basically humans that go above and beyond their duty as humans for the betterment of the community, right? So what I wanted to do is create this body of work where that focus specifically, well it started off first as basically people from my community, my friends and family, I mean my friends and friends and friends, then it started getting a little too big, and what I wanted to do was hone in on a specific aspect of the community, and in this case I decided that I wanted to focus on activists and community organizers and poets, basically people that are out there making our community visible by their work, whether it's doing activism for immigration, trans visibility, or sex worker rights, different themes like that. So this is Mitchell and he's actually one of the reasons why I decided to focus on that community. He's an activist who basically sort of like he's an activist for sex workers and he creates like zines and creates information packets to hand out to people that are forced to do this kind of work. And knowing his story it just made sense to me to include him in this project. So what I started doing more recently also is I started having a dialogue with the person who I'm photographing, right? So usually when you take a portrait, you're taking that portrait and it's up to the viewer who basically gives meaning to that portrait based on their own experience. But what I wanted to do is I wanted to give that voice back to the person who's actually who's portrait it is. So what I started doing more recently is having them hand write whatever they wanted to write, whether it's like prose if they're poets or what it is about their identity that they want to basically want the world to know about them. So this is Bakar and he's a poet and a lot of his work is about him being queer, a person of color and who loves sex, you know, who's very sex positive about his work. So that's basically what's around his image. And so this is his handwriting. And what I do is I usually take their portrait, give them a copy of the portrait that I took and they hand write whatever they want to write around their image. I take that screen and silk screen, the text over the print after I've already finished it. So what I usually do is I create four to five variations of every print. So this is Erica, she is an activist in Puerto Rico actually who does a lot of healthcare work for the trans community in Puerto Rico. This is a portrait that I did before I got the idea to write or have them write their texts. So what I normally do is this is a printmaking process called photogravier. So it's a metal plate, I have a little video that I can show you at the end. So because it's a printmaking process I'm able to duplicate the same image multiple times and all of the color and patterns you see in the back is decorative paper that I buy and I hand cut to match the image. And so this is one of four that I have of her. And this is a Jamal who is a poet and I never got around to getting his texts but this is actually one of the most popular images in the series, it's one of the strongest ones. And that's Sonia, another activist, a poet who does a lot of activism for the undocumented queer community actually here in the Bay Area and in New York. And that's Jalissa, a poet who is really active in New York City and that is Carlos and Fernando. I wouldn't say they call them activists but I thought that the fact that they've been together for ten years and that our Latinos, it's very hard for me to find queer couples that have been together that long and like have made it work, whether it's long distance. And they're just, to me they're my heroes because that's something that I would love to find and create my own family. So that's probably the only one, actually it is the only one that I have that's a couple. And that's Eric who is an activist who is HIV positive and he goes on, he has like a YouTube video, a YouTube channel where he talks about his status and talks about organizations and basically he wants to destigmatize the fact that HIV being positive is a stigma right now so him talking about it is one of the reasons why I chose him to be part of this project. And that's Laura Luna, another activist who, she works mostly with like visibility, like body politics and breaking that idea that only you have to be like wafers then to be accepted in the queer community. So the fact that she embraces her body and loves herself for it and is constantly like taking self-portraits, doing selfies and posting them all over social media, it's her way of sort of inserting herself into that narrative also. And so I took these shots so that you could see what they look like framed. So these are actually all like the image itself is 11 by 14 and the image size is, I'm sorry, the image size is 8 by 10 and the actual print is 11 by 14. So I make all of these frames because again like I said I'm very attracted to religious art and I wanted all the frames that I make I sort of are homage to things that you would see in a church. And I also brought some of the original prints so you could see because one of the things about this process is that I use a lot of metallic paper and iridescent paper so it's a work that you have to really walk around to see, to really appreciate the image. Oh and here's the little video there. So it's a photographic process, it's a metal plate that I burned the image on and I have to ink it, rub the ink out and then this is all the color that goes. So a lot of people ask me like why is it, why don't I just make this into a digital work, you know why don't I just take a portrait and digitally create this image. But I really like to work with my hands and I really like the idea that it's something, it's like a little treasure that I took my time to create and to, it's sort of like a jewel you know where you want to appreciate it. Where if it was something done digitally I could just easily like knock it out and have like tons but the fact that it takes me quite a bit of work to create one image, I want to add that to that narrative or to that idea that it's, they're precious and they're worthy for all of the labor that I put into it. I think that's it, I don't know if that's too short or that's...