Tyza Stewart: Hey Remember When I Had a Rat Tail

Overview

Opening at Firstdraft from June 7 is a new exhibition from Brisbane-based artist Tyza Stewart, whose self-portraits of ambiguously gendered selves interrogate fixed ideas of binary gender. Hey Remember When I Had a Rat Tail focuses on the issue of transgender visibility, and its potential use as a tool to limit discussion of queer experiences of gender.

Stewart works in what has been called a brutally honest, occasionally controversial way, using video and oil painting to create art that challenges and complicates the viewer's perception of gender. The aim? To frustrate our ability to neatly categorise and apply normative readings to a person's identity (something the artist has personally experienced during interactions with various journalists and art institutions), and instead embrace complexity, ambiguity and multiplicity.

Interviewed in Manuscript Daily, Stewart says, "I want to experience less rigid, polarised ways of understanding and being perceived, and I think a lot of other people might also benefit from this, so that's the kind of larger political agenda I'm interested in being involved in."

Promises to be a thought-provoking show.

Image: Tyza Stewart, Hey Remember When I Had a Rat Tail, courtesy the artist and Firstdraft.