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 a love letter to my memories, gender transition, family and the pop icons that have carried me through. A deployment of these iconographies is a deployment of the self. 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 of home and my desire to amend it. In attempting to heal my inner child, I reimagine a girlhood that sadly will never truly be mine. I emulate models of femininity outside of my reality. I escape into a feminine-fantasy as an act of survival from the fear and shame I felt as a trans adolescent.
My works cumulatively create my portrait, blending video, photography, drawing, and painting. I render with painstaking detail until I’ve reached a photo-realistic image as a means to nurture and hold the little trans girl inside me. Some of my portraits show vulnerability and tenderness by displaying the trauma of my trans adolescence through greyscale and censorship. Others are rendered through rose-tinted glasses by drenching them in the girly outfits, candy-coated pinks and vibrant backgrounds I longed for in my childhood. My self-portraits act as a political memoir, seducing the viewer into visceral and intimate confrontations with my trans body.
