Jay Michelle Elizondo (b. 1996 Columbus, OH) lives and works in Brooklyn, New York. Elizondo is an artist whose use of video, photography, drawing, and painting seduces viewers into intimate confrontations with her trans body. She received an MFA from School of Visual Arts in 2020 and a BFA from Columbus College of Art & Design in 2018. Elizondo’s work has been featured in select exhibitions including Body Freedom For Every(Body) presented by Project For Empty Space at Times Square in New York. NY, Best Cult at SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York, NY, Idol Worship at Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY, Artist in Focus at Baxter St. in New York, NY, and Satellite Art Fair in Miami, FL. Her curatorial projects include (UN)FIXED at SoMad in New York, NY, You Remember How Lonely Everything Was in The Beginning at Please Don’t Come to This Show (Online) and Talented, Brilliant, Incredible, Amazing, Showstopping, Spectacular, Never The Same, Totally Unique, Completely Not Ever Been Done Before, Unafraid To Reference Or Not Reference, Put It In A Blender, Shit On It, Vomit On It, Eat It, Give Birth To It at SVA Chelsea Gallery in New York, NY. She is a current fellow at A.I.R. Gallery and was a 2020 resident artist at The Chautauqua School of Art Residency in Chautauqua, NY. Elizondo’s work was featured in Smack Mellon’s 2022 Hot Picks, following her feature the year before. She is a recipient of The 2020 Edward Zutrau Memorial Award, The Jeff F Hilson Memorial Fund, and The Edith Smilack Fund. Her work has been published in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, Daily Lazy, Sidewalkkilla, and Front Runner Magazine.
Artist Statement
My work is an invitation to my intimate, unfiltered world, where, as a transgender woman, I transform complex emotions around nostalgia, home, family, and traumatic childhood experiences. I create a reality I couldn’t access. I blend video, photography, drawing, painting, and archival material to construct that reality. Much of my work is born out of hurt; markers of memory in emotional times. I manipulate that hurt through a constant tension between my strained nostalgia for home and my desire to amend it. Grief warps time, encompassing past, present, and future. Moving through it, I protect my inner child by redacting her deadname in archival footage and continuing to emulate women in pop culture as she did. As an adult, I boldly display my trans body in defiance of society’s obsession with it. A blend of innocence and decadence; life and art intertwined. The tension between what I reveal and withhold plays a nuanced, vital role in my work. Visibility is important, but so is self-preservation. The real power lies in what I keep private.
My body has always centered my work. Some depictions are tender acts of vulnerability, rendered with painstaking detail until I reach a softer, photo-realistic image to nurture and hold my inner trans child with slow care. Others are bold expressions of resistance rendered through rose-tinted glasses; drenched in the hyper-feminine outfits, candy-coated pinks, and vibrant backgrounds I longed for in childhood. Every detail echoes my life’s trials, tribulations, and triumphs.
Attempting to heal my inner child, I reimagine a girlhood that sadly will never be mine. I do so through emulation, where fantasy meets stark reality. I perform models of femininity outside my own— facsimiles of my mother, grandmother, and sister, alongside the women in pop culture who shaped me. A deployment of these iconographies is a deployment of the self. By emulating them I achieve a more raw, honest expression, escaping into a feminine-fantasy as an act of survival from the fear and shame I felt as a trans adolescent. My self-portraits act as a political memoir, seducing the viewer into visceral confrontations with my trans body.
