At The Table:A 2SLGBTQ+ Visibility Project

Each portrait begins with the quiet presence of someone what has been unseen. The people I draw are members of the 2SLGBTQ= community who live with the constant tension of being visible and unseen. Their faces hold quiet endurance and a demand to be recognized-not as symbols, but as individuals who exist fully in their own truth.

This series was born from the idea of the table as both exclusion and invitation. For too long, queer and marginalized people have been denied a seat-spoken about, legislated over, and erased from records meant to define them. At the Table reclaims that space. Every portrait becomes its own act of resistance, a record written in colour and light.

The works draw on visual and bureaucratic languages of power-those used to categorize and control. I integrated text fragments, archival references, and typographic traces across the surface, echoing the systems that once dictated and still dictates who belongs. Yet the drawings insist on life beyond those structures. The softness of coloured pencils, the layered marks, the fragility of paper-all speak to resilience that refuses containment.

These portraits are not about identity as a label, but as lived evidence. They ask viewers to sit in relation-to listen, to witness, to recognize. At this table, no one needs permission to be seen.

At the Table|Dhenae

Coloured pencil & mixed media on paper. 40" x 60".

Mounted on aluminum panels, unframed.

The Elements of the Series: Historical References & Other

1. The Seated Figure

Historic Codes of Power

In aristocratic and political portraiture, a seated pose often signaled authority, permanence, and status. The chair itself was a throne-like marker of rank.
Sitting wasn’t casual—it was a declaration: I belong here. I command this space.
Historically, who got “the seat” in art mirrored who had a seat in life.
The posture was part of a visual hierarchy—a system that told the viewer who mattered and who didn’t.

2. The Typography
Visual Language of Power

Bureaucratic fonts—rigid, uniform, utilitarian—signal control, compliance, and standardization. They appear in legal codes, forms, and institutional documents designed to enforce rules, strip individuality, and maintain hierarchies.
These were the kinds of typographic systems that carried policies regulating queer lives—laws that criminalized homosexuality, medical pathologization, government decrees. The fonts are not neutral; they are aesthetic evidence of systemic control.

3.The White

Absence & Stripping Away: Loss & Resistance

Historically, color in aristocratic portraiture signified wealth, status, and vitality (rich fabrics, deep tones, opulent textures). Removing that color creates a sense of emptiness or what has been taken away.
Mourning & Erasure: White often represents absence or erasure—a blank slate where identity has been stripped. For marginalized communities, it echoes the loss of visibility and cultural space.
Purity Turned Political: In queer and feminist movements, white has been reclaimed as a visual language of protest and neutrality that refuses ornamental codes of privilege.
Anti-Opulence: By dressing sitters in white, I reject the show of wealth and hierarchy embedded in historical portraiture. It becomes a radical simplification—saying: we do not play by your rules of power.
Queer Aesthetic of Refusal: It’s a deliberate denial of coded markers of “importance,” asserting value through presence rather than adornment.

4. The Objects

In classical and aristocratic portraiture, objects were coded symbols of wealth, education, power, and morality—books, instruments, fine fabrics, globes, religious items. They functioned as status signals.
These props weren’t neutral; they reinforced social hierarchies.
Each item in this series carries hidden narratives of pain, love, resistance, and joy. These aren’t decorative—they’re charged with meaning, like talismans or fragments of a life.
They allow for visual storytelling: a subtle, quiet language that operates alongside the sitter’s gaze and the embedded text.
By rejecting elitist symbols and replacing them with everyday things, you dismantle the historic idea that only certain lives are worth immortalizing.
You insist that ordinary people—those historically excluded from the frame—deserve the same monumental treatment as the powerful.

5. Hyper-realism

The Politics of Representation

Historically, power was immortalized through realism (royalty, clergy, state officials). By applying that same monumental precision to queer sitters, they claim the same cultural permanence historically reserved for elites.
It resists erasure—photographic realism says: this is real, this person exists, and you can’t ignore them.
Hyperrealism isn’t about showing off skill; it’s about forcing the world to look. These aren’t abstractions or softened depictions—they are recognizable, undeniable presences.
That recognition has stakes: being seen can mean being targeted. For some sitters, appearing in this work carries real danger.
Every portrait is built on intense trust. You’re asking your sitters to risk more than posing—they risk being “outed,” harassed, or even harmed because of how real these images are.
This heightens the ethical and emotional dimension of your work: it’s not just an image, it’s a collaboration steeped in courage.
In an era where anti-LGBTQ rhetoric is rising, hyperrealistic visibility is a radical refusal to disappear. It says: You want us erased? Here we are, bigger than life, looking you dead in the eye.