*WAIT-LIST* - I Am Love: Queer Identity and Reciprocal Care

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In this three-session workshop, students will explore queer identity through self-portraiture, visual storytelling, and digital compositing. Participants are invited to imagine what it might look like if a version of themselves could step outside their body and offer themselves love. Drawing inspiration from the nurturing, reciprocal love that manzanarez describes within queer community, this workshop centers love, respect, and affirmation as a revolutionary act. The poem In Lak’ech by Luis Valdez expresses this sentiment clearly: “If I love and respect you, I love and respect myself.” Care begins with how we give it. In queer love, learning to love and respect oneself is essential to survive, and this workshop explores the many ways individuals visually express that relationship with themselves.

The workshop begins with studying contemporary queer artists who use self-portraiture to assert visibility and employ storytelling to confront, reflect on, and celebrate queer identity. Building on these examples, students will participate in an in-class demonstration focused on lighting, posing, and photographing the self, exploring how personal identity can be translated into visual narrative.

Students will then learn and apply advanced Photoshop layering and compositing techniques to clone and multiply the self, combining multiple figures into a single image that embodies internal dialogues of self-love and care. Through this process of multiplication, participants will examine the fluid, evolving relationship between body and identity, emphasizing transformation, multiplicity, and self-representation.

LEARNING OBJECTIVES

• Develop proficiency in processes for transforming portraits by experimenting with digital layering
• Build familiarity with Adobe Photoshop tools and navigation
• Research and analyze works of queer thinkers and artists, identifying strategies used to storytell, challenge norms and amplify diverse identities
• Investigate personal identities through self-reflection and creative processes, connecting to social, economic, political, and cultural contexts
• Foster an empathetic awareness of the self and share an interconnectedness with others through the creation and critique of art
• Use portraiture as a medium to question and reimagine societal norms, producing work that challenges reductive representations
• Clearly articulate the conceptual intentions and cultural significance behind their artistic choices

ABOUT THE INSTRUCTOR
In their transdisciplinary art practice tom manzanarez utilizes the body as a vessel to explore eroticism, critique, and reflexivity. Through time our bodies become containers for stories. They endure constructed representations of our will and reflect the physical evidence of our lived experiences. By capturing the body in multiple forms and environments, their work acts as an archive to reflect on past selves in relation to who they are now and will become. Through modes of performance, research, writing, installation, and photography, their work centers around their positionality as a queer gender non-conforming person and provides them a way to reflect on their experiences. Often in themes criticizing social constructs of gender and sexuality, whitewashing, erasure, heritage reformation and queer love.

Their work has been exhibited at after/time in Portland, OR, Lightbox Gallery of Astoria, OR, Archie Bray Foundation in Helena, MT, the LGBT Center Gallery and Frontier Space of Missoula, MT, as well as being published in Numero Magazine. They received their BFA from The University of Montana and their MFA from Pacific Northwest College of Art (PNCA) in Portland, OR. During their time at PNCA, they pursued a career in higher education and were also selected for the Community Fellowship for their work in event organizing and fostering inclusivity throughout the institute. Currently they teach at Photographic Center Northwest in Seattle, WA.

Images © tom manzanarez