Essays
Counted and Erased: The Architecture of Legibility and the Counter-Archival Practice of At the Table-2025
One fact continues to return because it reveals how recognition actually functions. Prior to 2021, Canadian hate crime reporting did not distinctly identify transgender or non-binary victims. Incidents were absorbed into residual categories such as “other sex or gender,” rendering these forms of violence statistically indistinct. This was not an oversight. It was structural. Even after gender identity and expression were added to federal law in 2017, the systems responsible for recording harm did not meaningfully adjust. Legal recognition existed in name, while the mechanisms of documentation continued to produce absence. In 2019, this gap was already visible. The problem was not that violence was unknown. It was that it could not be properly counted. Without specific categories, there was no stable way for institutions to register what was happening, and therefore no pressure to respond to it. In October 2021, Statistics Canada updated its reporting to explicitly include transgender and non-binary categories. This change did not resolve the problem. It made the failure measurable. What had been diffuse and unaccounted for could now begin to appear, but only within the limits of a system still built on classification. This is the condition from which my work emerges. When I speak about counter-legibility, I am not describing invisibility. I am describing the demand placed on queer and trans people to become legible within systems that were not designed to hold them. Legibility presents itself as neutral description, but it operates as a sorting mechanism. It determines what can be recognized, what can be recorded, and what is allowed to appear as a coherent subject. At the Table stages this condition directly. Each sitter is positioned at a white administrative surface, the site where decisions are formalized and categories are enforced. The table is not symbolic. It is procedural. It marks the point at which a life is translated into a record. The bureaucratic text, typographic structures, and rigid panel surfaces do not decorate the work. They expose the architecture that produces recognition while simultaneously limiting it. The portraits operate as a counter-archive. They do not correct the record. They reveal its conditions. Where institutional systems fragment or erase lived experience, the drawing holds what exceeds those structures. It does not resolve the gap. It insists on its presence. This work continues because the problem persists. Systems claim neutrality while relying on formats that cannot accommodate the complexity of human lives. When identity or violence falls outside those formats, it does not disappear. It becomes illegible. I draw to make that illegibility visible.
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.