Tenth Anniversary Artwork

The image depicts a life-sized self-portrait collage that I created during the COVID-19 pandemic and during my first semester of grad school. The collage is constructed from torn magazine pages and reassembled onto a tracing of me. This collage symbolizes both forced and voluntary transformation. The forced transformation reflects how we collectively navigated unprecedented change and loss during the pandemic. The voluntary change is found in an intentional act of reclaiming power through the remaking of myself out of magazine pieces, at a time when I felt powerless. By transforming fragmented images into a new representation of being, I asserted agency in a time uncertainty. The magazines that I used to make the collage were all found or gifted to me. When people in my community heard that I was collaging, they would give me their discarded magazines. Nothing is ever made in isolation. We create from the resources that are available to us, often through the generosity and care of others.

The process and expression represented in the collage mirror the themes and values of Catalyst—where dominant science and technology narratives are challenged, deconstructed, and remade into something new as a response to the techno-capitalist racialized, gendered, and militarized world and as a desire for something different. Both the artwork and the journal challenge linear and hierarchical ways of thinking, offering alternative, multiple methods of understanding complex phenomena. In doing so, Catalyst foregrounds multiplicity and interconnectedness, rejecting singular, objective truths in favor of a more layered and intersectional understanding of the world.