Essays
Counted and Erased: The Architecture of Legibility and the Counter-Archival Practice of At the Table-2025
On how portraiture can function as a counter-archive when institutional records fail to recognize queer and trans lives. One fact continues to return because it reveals something fundamental about the system we live within. Although Canada recorded sex- or gender-motivated hate crimes before 2021, transgender and gender-diverse targets were largely absorbed into an “other sex or gender” category. It was not until October 2021 that national police reporting expanded to explicitly code transgender and non-binary targets, making these forms of violence statistically legible as distinct phenomena (Statistics Canada, Hate Crimes in Canada). The problem was not simply undercounting. It was structural. Incidents were sorted into categories such as “sex,” “sexual orientation,” or “other sex or gender,” fracturing the very bias they were meant to document and obscuring how gender-nonconforming and trans experiences overlap in lived reality. As Abigail Curlew wrote in The Conversation in 2019, “before the new wording in the legislation, police had not kept an official record on the hate crimes against trans and nonbinary folks. This invisibility had troubling implications for our criminal justice system. With no record of the violence we experience, there was no need for the government to act.” Violence was not absent from the record. The format was incapable of recognizing it. This structural gap is one of the conditions from which my work emerges. When I speak about counter-legibility, I am referring to the everyday pressure placed on queer and trans people to make themselves readable inside formats designed without them. Legibility presents itself as neutral description, but it operates as a form of cultural sorting. It determines who is counted, who is documented, and who is permitted to appear as a coherent subject within the record. My work repeatedly returns to the question of what happens when the body a system attempts to define refuses to shrink to fit the category. At the Table makes this tension visible by placing each sitter at a white administrative table, the surface where policies, codes, and institutional decisions are produced. The table marks the site where inclusion is promised, restricted, or withheld. The bureaucratic fonts, rigid text blocks, and clinical panel surfaces are not aesthetic decoration. They point to the systems that structure recognition and record. Seen this way, the portraits operate as a counter-archive. They do not simply represent individuals. They register the limits of the systems that attempt to classify them. Where official records fracture or erase lived experience, the portrait holds testimony that those structures cannot easily contain. This work continues because the problem persists. Institutional systems claim neutrality while relying on categories that cannot hold the complexity of human lives. When violence or identity falls outside those formats, it risks disappearing from the official record. I draw to make that failure visible and to insist that the lives shaped by those gaps remain present. This is not art about social issues. It is a record of what the system cannot read. References Curlew, Abigail. “Transgender Hate Crimes Are on the Rise Even in Canada.” The Conversation, August 25, 2019. Statistics Canada. Hate Crimes in Canada. Ottawa: Statistics Canada.
When the Format Fails - 2025
This essay examines how bureaucratic and institutional formats attempt to stabilize identity and how portraiture can expose the limits of those structures. Portraiture is often understood as a way of representing the body. For many years I assumed my work followed that logic. I believed the drawings addressed queer presence: visibility, erasure, and the struggle for recognition. Yet each time I framed the work that way something felt incomplete. The language was already saturated with familiar narratives of exclusion. Across contemporary art and critical theory, many artists and writers have examined how institutions classify and regulate human life. Legal systems, medical records, bureaucratic files, and administrative documents all operate through structured formats that determine what counts as intelligible. These systems present themselves as neutral frameworks of description, yet they carry the historical assumptions of the institutions that produced them. When a life does not align with those structures, the result is not simply misunderstanding but correction, discipline, or exclusion. My work enters this conversation through the lens of portraiture. The problem is not that queer bodies are illegible, but that the institutional formats designed to read them are structurally inadequate. This realization clarified the logic of my portrait series At the Table. Each sitter stands before a field of text formatted like an administrative document: rigid blocks of uppercase Helvetica arranged with bureaucratic precision. The typography carries the visual authority of institutional language, yet the words themselves originate with the sitter. Personal testimony is compressed into a structure designed for classification rather than lived complexity. The tension between those elements is central to the work. The format appears stable and authoritative, but the sitter’s presence exposes its limits. The body remains steady while the structure meant to interpret it begins to fracture. This line of thinking also points toward the next stage of the project, Section 149. If At the Table exposes the inadequacy of imposed formats, Section 149 considers what happens when the body begins to write itself against them. Bureaucratic language may remain present as pressure or residue, but it no longer functions as the primary author of meaning. Instead, subtle inscriptions begin to surface, signaling agency rather than classification. The shift is not from oppression to liberation in any simple sense. It is a movement from imposed legibility toward what might be called a counter-legible body: a body that exposes the interpretive architecture surrounding it while asserting its own terms of recognition. Seen this way, the evolution from At the Table to Section 149 is not a change of subject but a deepening of the same inquiry. The work examines how systems attempt to stabilize identity through format, and how lived presence ultimately reveals the fragility of those structures.
Counter-Legibility - 2025
An exploration of counter-legibility as a framework for understanding how queer subjects resist the demand to perform clarity within institutional systems. Conversations about legibility often drift toward theory, but for queer people it begins somewhere more ordinary. It begins in the small adjustments made before stepping out the door. Recently I was talking with my spouse about clothes we wanted to wear. We mentioned ties, sharper lines, and bold queer jewellery, and hesitation appeared almost immediately. Not because we questioned our choices, but because we wondered whether the world would know how to read us. That brief pause is where legibility lives. Legibility sounds simple: be understandable, be clear, be coherent. In practice, however, it is a cultural demand shaped by institutions. Allan Sekula captured this when he wrote that “the portrait guarantees that the individual is both a social fact and a biological one.” Some people are granted that status without question. Others are forced to earn it, justify it, or reshape themselves to fit formats designed by someone else. I use the concept of counter-legibility to describe what happens when someone refuses to perform readability on someone else’s terms. The problem is not complexity in the self but the systems that insist on simplicity. Counter-legibility names the moment when a person stops smoothing out the rough edges of experience simply to avoid misinterpretation. It marks a shift from adjusting oneself to be understood to recognizing the pressure that demands that adjustment in the first place. In my work this idea becomes material rather than purely theoretical. Through portraiture, typography, and spatial staging, I examine how institutional formats attempt to stabilize identity and how lived presence unsettles those structures. My work sits inside that tension. I am not trying to obscure the sitter. I am trying to expose the forces that shape how they are permitted to appear. Legibility is more than social behavior. It is administrative, medical, and legal. It is embedded in forms, diagnostic language, immigration policy, religious doctrine, and the neutral tone of bureaucracy. It teaches people how to present themselves in order to avoid friction. It asks us to anticipate misunderstanding by making ourselves smaller. In At the Table, this tension appears quietly but deliberately. White clothing resists easy classification. The table functions as an administrative surface reclaimed by the sitter. The background typography borrows the visual authority of bureaucracy but carries the sitter’s own words. Personal language interrupts a format historically used to define them. That interruption is counter-legibility at work. The appearance of bureaucracy is authored by the person who has lived through its consequences. Saidiya Hartman writes that “what is required is a new way of telling,” and that impulse sits behind this framework. Counter-legibility does not create obscurity. It creates space for stories that exceed the tidy narrative structures institutions recognize. It refuses the demand that a life must be simplified before it can be acknowledged. Counter-legibility also asks something of the viewer. It slows perception and interrupts the instinct to decode. Tina Campt reminds us that some images “demand that we listen closely to what is seen.” Counter-legible portraiture works in a similar way. It makes clarity feel too easy and invites a different form of attention, one that accepts complexity rather than resolving it. This direction continues in my next body of work, Section 149. Beginning after the completion of At the Table in early 2026, the series extends the idea of counter-legibility by working more directly with the pressures queer people navigate in real time. Where At the Table examines the administrative surface of recognition, Section 149 moves toward the deeper structures that shape how bodies are read, managed, and resisted across different regions and histories. Counter-legibility provides the conceptual framework. The new series expands its visual vocabulary. What I want these portraits to hold is not explanation but presence. Not correctness but truthfulness. A refusal to shrink for legibility’s sake and a willingness to let the viewer encounter the sitter without the comfort of a ready-made category. Counter-legibility ultimately shifts the question of interpretation. It redirects attention from the body being read to the systems doing the reading. Once that shift becomes visible, the portrait stops functioning as an image to decode and becomes something else. It becomes a place where the limits of interpretation reveal themselves.