2025 SPE Annual Conference: Adaptations
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print this pageChasing Mania: Invisibly Queer, Femme, and Bipolar
Imagemaker: Marico Fayre
Sunday, September 15 - 9:00AM to 9:45AM
ELIF 305
Photography is a powerful vehicle to manifest our stories and has long been a tool for visibility. For centuries we have used art to express personal truths, explore fantasies, construct identities, leave records of our existence, challenge societal constructs, and preserve memories. Through frozen images we have the ability to see places we'll never visit, cultures that connect us to people both similar and very different from ourselves, records of history, cruelty, love, and accomplishments we could never have imagined. Photography can also bring clarity as it allows us to observe our own experiences, showing where we have been and how we became the people we are.
I believe that an artistic awareness of self transcends the page (or the screen) and shifts our interactions with the world. When we understand how we are perceived by others and how we see ourselves, we can become more intentional with our actions and choices and, ultimately, what impact we have on the world.
For many years I've felt invisible to both queer and straight worlds - being inherently and proudly feminine means I am assumed to be, to act, and to love is a certain way. Though the heteronormative box never fit, the queers didn't see me, and I stubbornly refused to dress or behave a certain way in order to prove I belonged.
For years I wanted to include this experience in my work and didn't know how, until I realized that I feel very invisible both as a queer femme and as a person with bipolar who looks "normal" (according to societal expectations) because of the behaviors and coping mechanisms I've learned in order to function in the world. Taking up space, challenging how I am seen and what is projected onto me, and redefining how queerness looks and how depression, anxiety, PTSD, and mania manifest became integral in my life and my art.
Presenting in Alaska will be the first time I fully speak about this in public. This talk will discuss how autobiographical art transcends the narcissistic implication of the current "selfie" trend and the reasons we choose to use ourselves as our subject matter and explore some of the reasons artists from marginalized groups create autobiographical images, including catharsis, witness, metaphor, or memory. I will share my own work and also talk about a few other contemporary photographic artists who use the medium in a similar way.
speaker
Marico Fayre
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