about

Embry Valentino O’Leary is a transsexual individual and interdisciplinary artist from the United States. After a childhood in Chicago, Illinois and young adult years in Portland, Maine, Embry is currently a MA/MFA candidate at the University of Iowa.As a DIY enthusiast and self-proclaimed deviant, Embry's experimental work weaves together installation, ephemera creation, printmaking, assemblage, and digital media. This practice is fluid and precarious, utilizing maximalist aesthetics, recycled materials, wry text, and found objects to explore themes of impermanence, instability, pleasure, identity, and illness—aspects of life that are intrinsically linked when inhabiting a trans body and living in queer spaces. Some of Embry's favorite materials, objects, and mediums to use are bed linens, stuffed animals, open source video and photo editing software, duct tape, rhinestones, and instant cameras.Embry can be contacted by emailing evalentinoart@gmail.com.

artist statement

My work is eclectic, my processes are unconventional, and my journey is nontraditional. I am constantly shifting; moving house, recovering from illness, bending my gender, changing my names. Possessing an unstable body and identity leads to an attachment to tangible things outside of myself. I have an affection for discarded junk— my work employs an array of well-loved, texturally stimulating found objects that can be tacked, taped, or tied. Temporary security and delicate, precarious bindings allow my pieces to remain free. They can be undone and transplanted into a new environment, repeated or rearranged. My use of multiplicity, the aesthetics of maximalism, and strategies of symbolism reflect my high esteem for queer indulgence and transsexual/transgenderism. My ephemera and craft materials are adorably cheap and vulnerable. I take the mundane and the painful, and twist them, reinvent them, until they become reflections of an ideal being.These conceptual and technical habits are anomalous, experimental, and deviant. My background is mostly self-taught, with formal art education being a luxury I have only recently been able to pursue. As such, my practice is a patchwork collection of mediums, disciplines, concepts, and inspirations. I am as inspired by romantic poetry and Northern Renaissance art as I am by low-budget horror films, drag queens, and DIY websites from the early 2000s. While I began using affordable materials solely out of necessity, I have committed to using these same materials with purpose. Every choice I make to adorn a discounted canvas with gel pens is an act of resisting the binary of “high” and “low” art. Repurposed pill bottles allow me to explore concepts of mental illness while being less wasteful when it comes to the items that keep me healthy. I give discarded stuffed animals new life in my installations. I am obsessed with my outdated iPhone, which I use to warp myself into a work of art with a snap of the selfie camera and the help of a few apps. I proliferate my ideas with copy paper and nontoxic craft glue. I balk at societal standards of beauty; my odd, tacky, and rejected components are proudly elevated into the gallery space as a new prompt for creative conversation.I present raw investigations of my body, my identity, and my place in the world in hopes of sparking similar curiosities in others. I staple Valentine hearts onto everything to remind myself and others to be passionate and indulgent with their love, even if that love is nothing but a fabricated performance. With this work, I invite viewers to sensually explore these private and confusing parts of the self within and outside of its surroundings. As an act of radical queerness, I welcome others to violate boundaries with me, to subvert what we think we know, and to revel in both the pain and the joy that comes from instability.

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Text on black paper reads:"Transphobes do not care how much dysphoria you have. Transphobes do not care how well you pass. Transphobes do not care if you have "always known." Transphobes do not care how many surgeries you've had. Transphobes do not care how much you hate the sex you were assigned at birth. Transphobes will not care about the amount of cringe compilations you've made. Transphobes will not care that you're not "one of THOSE" trans folks. Transphobes will not care if you are pretty. Transphobes will not care about the amount of hours you've clocked in on punching down. Transphobes do not care that you fit the trauma porn narrative of being trans. Transphobes do not care about your atrophied vagina, your botched augmentations, your pain from going so long without compassion and proper medical care. Be fucking grateful and kind towards the leaps we've made with trans rights. We are all freak perverts in the eyes of transphobes. Learn to live alongside "tucutes" "posers" "LARPers" "cringe" fake" "will never pass" "non-dysphoric" "non-op" trans people or DIE begging for cis acceptance."