 She is an artist who uses culturally classed materials to create 2D and performative work that explores how we might be programming our future in relationship to systems of marginalization. DeJesus Molesky has exhibited work in New York LA in the Bay Area. Please welcome her. I'm just so thrilled to be here. Thank you so much for having me and it's amazing to hear everyone's writing and to be a visual artist amongst such inspiring writers. And so I'm gonna go through a slide show of my work. So this is like a little doodle that I drew. I've been really into doodles and drawings and I just want to say I really love being in the library here. I really love being in a library because libraries have been a sanctuary for me my entire life and I grew up moving around my whole life all along the east coast down south and Midwest and not only were libraries a source of free air conditioning but they were also a place of friendship. Like books are where I found my friends and my adventures and it's also where I started my love of sci-fi and fantasy. So I'm an artist I'm also a sci-fi fantasy geek and one of the reasons why I just loved that genre so freaking much is because for the first time in my life in a creative way I got to witness people and authors talking about issues that I was already facing like discrimination and being an outsider and what it was like to be kind of like the scum of the earth in one world and then to magically find yourself relocated into another world where you were the hero and those kinds of stories fascinated me. So that's where a lot of my work is kind of sprung out of right now at this point in time and it started with so like really being interested in sci-fi and and visions of the future and when those visions of the future kind of started to take flight in the in the arena of television and movies it became really interesting because I started to look at like who are they casting in the future who's being casted in terms of the visual aesthetics of humankind and and our future survival. So I don't know if you guys grew up with this but this is one of the first like major sci-fi TV shows that I grew up with this is Star Trek TNG the next generation and this is like when me and my family would this is just like really happy memories of getting spring rolls at the Chinese food joint and watching Star Trek and just being fascinated so this is like you know late 80s through the 90s and and it could use some help in terms of the demographics of the future but it's still pretty radical for for that time you know so I started to become curious like how did we get from here to here and I mean I love Battlestar Galactica like I refer back to it a lot in my work I think it's a really interesting cultural text but just looking at at the difference of like as we're as we're you know so-called in a in a post-racial society and as we're like progressing and our who's being casted on television you know who's who's filling the spaces of how we are envisioning and building the future. So I'm just going to go through like some different uh some some different kind of mainstream sci-fi movies so Battlestar Galactica um Divergent did anyone see that movie this is supposed to be post-apocalyptic Chicago um the Hunger Games which I don't know if anyone read those books the Hunger Games books at all but the Hunger Games in the books the this character the main character Katniss Everdeen is actually a mixed character and her district is mixed but yet it's totally casted as completely white. Interstellar if anyone saw that movie people were like ranting and raving about it so this is like yeah Future America the 100 which is a TV show that I could get like you know 30 minutes through and I was like it's the same thing over and over so this in combination with being at an art school where I felt like the the education that I was getting was just really really Eurocentric art history education I made a decision in my second year that I was just going to create images of black and brown queer fems and that's all that I was going to focus on and no matter what medium and what I did that that was going to kind of be what the the visual aesthetics that I was going to work with so I started creating this body of work called Femm Gold where I was casting I like asked you know some home girls to to pose for me and I was looking a lot at like Cahindi Wiley and Mickalene Thomas at the time and really really just falling in love with the ways that they were positioning black people in positions of power and referencing a European canon of royalty and a European canon of majesty and class to signify power and dignity so I started getting interested in like how to signify queer femininity in a way that was powerful and dignified without necessarily referencing a European canon of art history and what other symbols were there like what other symbols that I have to draw from so this was kind of I'm just going to go through this body of work kind of quickly so using like you know like pugs and ferns instead of horses and swords or dinosaurs and staffs but basically like it was kind of I was kind of in that place where I was enjoying like where I was at in a sense but also it just felt really forced like it wasn't totally clicking and so I had to do a lot of reflection and I had this breakthrough where I realized that I was reinforced like while I was trying to get away from this European canon of art I was totally reinforcing and using this like really Eurocentric style of portraiture and using like ancient Greek and Roman aesthetics of posture and pose and proportion and so it was kind of this like realization for me because I in that moment I also noticed that it was completely unconscious and so it just was this pause of like completely unconsciously reinforcing exactly what I was trying to get away from and that I had internalized this idea of what was good and what was bad like what was good art and what was bad art and what was like a good way to render portraits and a bad way to render portraits and so it started me on this path of like kind of trying to look at and prove all of the ways that we as a society have been unconsciously programmed to reinforce certain systems of power and how are we doing that so I just got this I went on Google a couple days ago and I did these like little Google snapshots of different random searches and Google obviously isn't everything but it brings up like the most the highest hits right so I just did Google searches on person child romance beauty artist genius and god and these are the general representations that we have for these really really big themes of humanity and when we come from such a multifaceted global culture why is it why is it that this really really small percentage of the population is what is being represented as a cultural baseline and the cultural norm and how does that not only like represent humanity but how does that then impact our experience how we're able to experience the world as as a human race so I found this quote that basically is something that when I'm having like this one of those existential artist moments of like why am I doing this why do I do what I do what's the point I like hold on to this quote and I'm going to read it out loud by Juno Diaz he says you guys know about vampires you know vampires have no reflections in a mirror there's this idea that monsters don't have reflections in a mirror and what I've always thought isn't that monsters don't have reflections in a mirror it's that if you want to make a human being into a monster deny them at the cultural level any reflection of themselves and growing up I felt like a monster in some ways I didn't see myself reflected at all I was like yo is something wrong with me that the whole society seems to think that people like me don't exist and part of what inspired me was this deep desire that before I died I would make a couple of mirrors that I would make some mirrors so that kids like me might see themselves reflected back and might not feel so monstrous for it so after after I found that quote it it just kind of anchored me in what what I was doing that that I wanted to be able to create mirrors and to be a part of that movement of like feeling this hunger feeling this void and so I began to feed myself in the places that I was really starving that I was like psychologically malnourished and culturally malnourished and I just allowed myself the authority to to really decide what were the cannons of art that I was drawing from so this this was the first piece that I made after that journey that realization and really just letting myself draw from magic letting myself draw from fantasy from sci-fi from Afro Caribbean art from pre-Columbian cannons of art from codices and hieroglyphs and alchemical documents and and and really that's where my that's where my work is now it's about this shifting of spiritual nourishment and to disrupt this current cultural baseline of like you know straight white masculine and really focusing on on a mythology of queer brown black feminine and the best piece of advice that I got was to turn turn your theory brain off when you're in the studio and just allow yourself to do what you do and then when you're done with that turn it back on and analyze it and really let your practice be your your queer pleasure so this was the first time that I felt like yeah my practice is my queer pleasure and I was also like for a second getting really into the queerness of mother nature and creating these like like what I thought of as as cyborg landscapes where there is different different pieces of land that you wouldn't necessarily see together and different pieces of time that you wouldn't see together and piecing them in the same space and I was like kind of obsessed with the t-rex as a queer symbol for a minute not just because of the gay hands but also because they're like have gotten a really bad rep in the dinosaur world as being like super ferocious and something that you need to look out for but then I found out that they were scavenger dinosaurs and so they really were the dinosaurs that went and cleaned up after everyone else's mess and I was like t-rexes man since the beginning of time and really think about queer culture too and how our queer culture and histories have really been erased and that's what my work is about is feeling like my people seeing seeing my a lot of my people's histories taken out of the past and misrepresented in the present and then being written out of the future and feeling a certain urgency around making sure that our stories are recorded in the ways that we see fit and then I started getting into installation and kind of seeing like appointing myself historian of this imaginary future and going and taking certain like pieces and items and collecting collecting them from this world and putting them in the gallery setting then so this piece is called apothecary it's a close-up this is deep dig and I really like I really like looking at the aesthetics of spiritual art too and who's depicted as like holy and sacred and what is depicted as godly or otherworldly and I've been interested in a lot of religious texts or at least contemporary religious texts queer people are talked about as like a mutation like a spiritual mutation of god basically and thinking about like what how reimagining the world as like um as like queer femininity as the genesis of all humanity basically um and what does that what does that creation story look like so this is a the a glitter box it's glitter and sugar um and it's like a place to play I guess in cosmos and space action shot this is dentata I also started making weaves from synthetic human hair and using um alchemical symbols of transmutation in these weaves and so this is the philosopher's stone and was the ultimate quest of the alchemists to be able to obtain immortality so this is weave for swallow and this weave is the enneagram but it was also thought to be the philosopher's stone in motion so it was like used as a as like a dance choreography blueprint for the philosopher's stone to embody immortality and this is weave for sync the um septogram seven point and star a symbol of ultimate unification between the planets so yeah really going really going back to using symbols to create a mythology um and to create a visual language like when our present becomes an ancient past in some distant future what are our hieroglyphs going to be what are our symbols and our stories and our tales and our gods and that's it thank you so much now I'm totally obsessed with you that was incredible like I feel like my mind was totally blown on my head thank you um and now this is really fun everyone and you get to ask them questions