Interview: Tate Peak - The Labor of Being Transgender and Other Works
Tate Peak (they/them) is an artist whose work incorporates experimental photographic processes, bookmaking, and other three-dimensional forms to explore the intersection of memory, the body, gender, and identity. They hold a BFA in photography from Arizona State University and have exhibited their work at several venues including ASU and Tempe Center for the Arts.
Below are some words that Tate has graciously shared with Too Tired Project about learning to see anew, navigating gender identity, and amplifying the voices of trans folks through their practice.
For readers who are seeing your work for the first time, can you talk a little bit about how you began working with photography and what motivates your practice?
Well, I first picked up a camera in middle school but I had no idea what I was doing. I managed to save up enough money to buy a Holga and would buy film at Walgreens and have it developed there. I was really interested in lomography but it didn't go much farther than that until college. I was a few years into studying psychology at ASU when I realized that it wasn't my passion, so I took a semester where I took some exploratory classes and photography was one of them. I never turned back after that, I fell in love. My practice is motivated by experimentation I think, and by self expression. I love film photography and alternative processes because of how weird and imperfect it is. I think it comforts me to have control over making pictures in such a tactile way, but still not being able to control everything. There's a mystery in it that I like to exploit as a way to understand myself and the world around me better. The "mistakes" and "imperfections" of those processes are so beautiful, and I see the same thing in myself and the rest of humanity.
In some of your works, you destroy, mar, or otherwise transform the physical nature of the prints. Can you talk more about how that experimentation functions within your practice and the concerns of your work? What connection do you see between materiality and alternative photographic processes and queerness?
Being able to interact physically with my prints and to experiment is essential to my practice. I want to create things that are unique, flawed, and beautiful; things that transcend the idea of photography that most people have. It's hard to put into words but the way I approach art is very similar to the way I approach my queerness. I want to be more than what people think I can be, I want my art to move in directions that challenge the traditional ideas of photography and fine art. If I think about how I use alternative processes and other mediums, it's kind of like my experience with transition and hormones. I start with something that is said to be one thing, or a process that is supposed to be done a specific way, and I turn it on its head to get what I want. It is important for me to feel physically connected to the work I make, probably because for such a long time I felt entirely disconnected from who I am. Having control over the processes in a way that I can see, being able to know why things are happening, and utilizing different mediums is how I am able to push my work past the "art binary" and into something new and exploratory.
In work such as Intrusive Thoughts, how do you think about or approach the multiple layers of performance that might be present due to the combination of physical manipulation and self-portraiture?
To be honest, I never actually think about performance when I make art, especially with this project. It doesn't occur to me, usually until long after, that my artwork has any performative aspect to it, but maybe that's because I'm always performing. As a Queer and Neurodivergent person, I'm pretty sure everything I do is some kind of show and my art is no exception to that rule. That isn't to say that I'm incapable of being genuine or something, but just that I mask and mimic to fit in. I try to be as real as I can, but the kicker is that I don't always know when I'm performing. In Intrusive Thoughts, the performance of femininity is absolutely intentional and I knew that going into it, but the other parts just felt real. You could say that the act of altering the images as if they were my physical self was a performance, and in a lot of ways it was, but it was a show I was putting on for myself to cope, and I didn't want to let myself see behind the curtain.
Transformation and perceptibility seem to be common visual threads throughout your work. Do you consider that to be one way that your work resists the cis gaze? When incorporating elements of portraiture, are there any other ways in which you intentionally disrupt or redefine the dynamic between viewer and subject?
I do think that transformation is one of the primary ways I attempt to resist the cis gaze. I like to be able to show change in a still image or object, or to take an object and make it into something totally new. Really, I just want people to rethink the categories and boxes they put everything in because the world is so much more than just a bunch of square pegs and square holes. I think within portraiture I like to attempt to redefine the category entirely and have the viewer reckon with that. It's kind of a cliche statement, but I view all art as a form of self portraiture and I like to challenge the viewer to see things other than people as portraits. The blurry outlines of my body are a portrait, the bodily fluids that grace some of my images are a portrait, my words are a portrait. I also like to challenge the viewer to become the subject. In some works I intentionally make the portrait vague so that the viewer can place themselves inside it. I have another series where I put cyanotypes on mirrors and the viewer can literally see themselves within the subject, or it can be more like just not showing a face, or just having a vague shape of a body that lets the viewer bridge that gap more easily.
In your own writing about your work, you’re very forthcoming about your struggles with mental health and the complexities involved with navigating gender identity. As an artist, how do you determine what you’re willing to share?
I am pretty much an open book. I don't think so much about what I'm willing to share, but rather what I am able to convey through the means at my disposal and what would potentially be perceived as interesting or compelling. I want to be as honest as I can about my experiences because I think the more we talk about those uncomfortable things, the better we can understand and help each other. Additionally, I want to add that especially more recently, I do take time to think about what is mine to share in the first place. As a white person, many narratives and topics are not mine to discuss and I always keep that in mind as I determine the subject matter of my work. It is important that people know that my experiences as a Queer, Neurodivergent, and mentally ill person are not representative of all experiences and that I cannot speak for others.
How has your relationship to your work changed over time, particularly now that you have transitioned?
My relationship with my work has changed a lot over the past few years. When I first started pursuing photography, I struggled to create cohesive projects and with the help of the amazing professors I had in school combined with my own personal growth, it has really blossomed. With transition specifically, it has made me look back on previous projects and really rethink what they were about, with Intrusive Thoughts being the most prominent example of that. I have become much more confident in what I want to say and use my art for in the world now that I know who I am, and I am more willing to test the boundaries of different mediums and subject matter and how those things can work together to create a larger and more impactful narrative.
Your body of work The Labor of Being Transgender is a mixed media project that includes letters written by transgender folks who you’ve connected with over time alongside lumen prints that you’ve made. Can you talk a bit more about how this project came to be?
I was in a class about labor during my last semester in school and I wanted to focus on emotional labor. Having just come out and being so early in my transition, I was working so hard to just be seen and respected by the world around me. There was no discourse that I could really find out there that represented the experiences of myself and my friends, that talked about the emotional labor we go through everyday to exist. I wanted to create a project by trans people for trans people, that also served as a window for cis people to peer into and learn from. Specifically, my goal was to challenge the ideas I had seen floating around that the biggest issues facing trans communities are things like bathrooms, or that the hardest part of being trans is “being born in the wrong body”. Trans lives are so much more nuanced than that. I wanted my trans siblings to be able to share their grievances, to talk about the things that affect them on a daily basis that are never given the attention they deserve but make up such a large part of our experiences. I chose lumen prints because of their transitional nature, and because I wanted to avoid portraiture as the basis for the project. As useful as it can be to give a face to something, it felt so important to capture as many different voices as possible because not all trans people look or experience the world as I do or my friends do. It was a long process to get to the “finished” project, I was constantly experimenting with the lumen prints and the format. I knew that the project needed to function similarly to a letter campaign, but it needed to go a step further. In the end I settled on a sort of greeting card format and reached out to trans communities online and in person to get submissions. I made the lumen prints with different plants, foods, and objects like my injection needles and old hormone vials as surrogates for the trans body. My letters were contained in the books because I wanted them to be separate from the cards, as a way of making it clearer to the viewer that it wasn’t all my voice, and I paired them with images of the lumen prints changing incrementally as a way to allow the viewer to witness my transition in a way. It was a long process but I couldn’t have done it without the community support I received and I am so thankful for that, trans love is eternal and special and transcends all obstacles.
What do you hope that your collaborators receive(d) by participating in The Labor of Being Transgender? When you think about how the production of that work has influenced you, what comes to mind?
I know and hope that the trans people that were able to view the work in person felt seen and heard and loved by the project. I hope it created a sense of community and solidarity. Many of the people who contributed did so digitally and were not able to see the finished project as they lived in other parts of the world, but I hope that just the act of writing the letter was able to give them a sense of peace and acted as a form of healing for them. In terms of how the project influenced me, I know that it helped me deal with a lot of things that were going on in my life. It changed the way I viewed interactions with my family, moving them from a place of anger to just asking them to care and understand and rejoice with me. It helped lift a weight off my shoulders, to just say the things I needed to say, to share my anger and my grief and my joy without the conversation turning into me making a cis person feel better about the labor they make me do. Those experiences needed to be shared and talked about, because people need to care about trans people and know how to do that. I just want people to be happy for me, I want to feel safe, to have access to care, and to be seen. I think that’s what most of us want in the end, is just to be really truly seen.
Do you at all consider the book format (and its variations) to be conducive to processing trauma and/or able to restore agency to the person whose voice and experiences are chronicled via text?
I do in a way. Maybe not necessarily the book format itself, but just the written word is an agent for healing, and the book is a beautiful way to store that information and that progress. Having a physical representation of your experience, of your words and thoughts, can give a person a sense of control that is really important. Personally, I don’t journal very much as a way to work through my feelings but I know that just getting the words out there is important for me, and specifically to have them seen by another person, and I hope this project functions in that way for others as well. The letter writing concept is also a strategy I have heard many therapists over the years talk about, whether it be writing a letter to a younger self or to a family member, and that is part of what inspired this project too. I do think that writing the letters and building them into beautiful art objects was conducive to processing trauma, and I hope that it gave the contributors a sense of control over their lives and their stories.
What’s next, where do you see your work going?
I'm not sure. The world has changed so much recently and so have I so it is hard to say. I know I would like to focus more on joy and awe in future projects. I plan to touch on topics like gender euphoria, and maybe explore neurodivergence in my art moving forward as well. I would like to incorporate more mediums and subjects into my practice as well, different forms of printmaking, textile or needlework, and I've been thinking a lot about how I can utilize still life imagery in my work as well.
If readers would like to see more of your work, where can they do so?
Right now the best place to see my work is via my Instagram (@ripekumquats). In the near future, a more comprehensive collection of my work will be available via the website portfolio I am currently building.