People: Kaylan Escamez

People: Kaylan Escamez

Gender in art and radical politics

Kaylan Escamez is a creator of radical art – radical in the very real sense through which radical politics departs and then thoroughly rams through existing society, tearing and reconstructing the impossible into the possible. Radical art, less a reaction to revolutionary events; becomes the revolutionary event – breaking apart all fixed, fast-frozen relations, with their train of ancient and venerable prejudices and opinions. For Kaylan’s part, his position in this realm of political possibilities is fixed on gender – perceptions, understandings, and norms thereof.

Influenced by Judith Butler, Michel Foucault, Monique Wittig, Simon Beauvoir and a host of other theorists and philosophers, Kaylan is part of a tradition that stems from decades of liberatory transgression.

He began with his BA, being “primarily focused on the way gender is distorted and blurred, with the association and fetishization of the use of the colour pink. Furthermore, exploring how this ideology of pink and gender is associated to skin and how the idea of identity is stained on the physical representation of skin”. To represent this, Kaylan experiments with all forms of art: illustration, photography, and drawing. “I prefer this” he said, “it creates a freedom of expression; sometimes what I want to create doesn’t resonate with one specific way of exhibiting that certain expression”.

Photography especially as a contemporary practice has an “ability of capturing raw organic presences, if you see a painting of something, it is a painting not reality. Photography has this unique way of making the viewers believe it is real”.

He appreciates the “the free-flowing expression that can take up any form. Some materials work for some things I want to say. It’s as simple as that. There is also beauty in that spontaneity, but ironically, I do always go for the camera to document the real likeness of these situations and expressions. Like Nan Goldin and her documentation of the Aids crisis in post-stonewall gay culture, photographs create a narrative and resemblance to reality”.

Gender for Kaylan exists within a set of social relations with express purpose of exacting control over bodies. “These labels are implemented in order to chastise and reject any human being that do not identify or resonate with the godly association of heteronormativity.

I.e. If your sexual identity or gender identity is not their assigned gender and/or heterosexual, you are automatically prejudiced, through many systematic institutions, whether it is government or religious”.

One example he uses is the infamous ‘blue and pink’ debate. “Pink has somehow ended up representing femininity and blue the opposite, masculinity. But what if that’s not the case; what if society has told us as people that you need to fit into one pregiven box. What if the whole notion of male and female is just a construct like blue and pink that is given to society in order to create some sort of dysfunctional social equilibrium?”

Thus, Kaylan in his art uses queer identities (non-binary protagonists, the use of drag) to example modes of gendered existence and give expression, in the beauty of the medium, to bodies that otherwise do not and cannot ‘conform’. “This is why it is important for me to use the colour pink, in a very fetishized shade as it further pushes that notion of gender”.

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18-06-2020 PANORAMAdailyGIBRALTAR