Rylee Brabham
BAD FAITH
I cannot talk about my work without talking about the South, I cannot talk about the South without talking about religion, and I cannot talk about religion without talking about transness.
BAD FAITH employs the familiarities of heirloom and the ubiquity of southern detritus in order to deploy a narrative that runs counter to the dominant ideology and culture I was steeped in growing up in rural Mississippi. Overtures of queerness are ever present in my work, often running in tandem with the ironies of religious ideology and normative gender ideals that echo in my upbringing. The structures and suspensions of ideological systems can be harmful, hateful - haunting. This work explores and satirizes the connections between identity and ideology, utilizing the language of domestic spaces to subsequently disrupt them. The barest bones of a building are the empty words of a pastor. A mass of cicada molts is a full church on Sunday.
Trans- as a prefix implies the movement of a person, thing, idea− movement upwards, downwards, across; movement from one state to another. Language and material work together in BAD FAITH to invoke that which is TRANS-, the transcendent, the transformative, the transgressive:
The transitory implications of a platform on casters, or a bottle of testosterone.
The transparency of lace or pantyhose as a mechanism of consensual revelation.
The transgressive capacity of a plastic baby doll; narratives of normativity refuted through iteration.
These fabricated, decidedly theatrical sets are interwoven with my own personal possessions and family heirlooms, allowing for a dialogue between reflections of my raising and a reimagined home where my transness might be considered something more than superficial rebellion, more than something to fervently pray away.
