Chelsea Thompto

Chelsea discussing her exhibit with everyone

Older, deeper, wiser. The words that artist Chelsea Thompto said about latest show at the CSUS campus library gallery. This show was way more then what meets the eye when you first enter. The first thing anyone would see is huge stomp of wood sitting by the entrance. From there everywhere you look is wood and few papers hung on the wall, nothing terribly overwhelming.

The whole show is about duality that is in every person, the male and female. Society is always trying to split everything down the middle, male or female but never both. When in reality there is both inside of every person and Chelsea was seeking to erupt the conversion on gender and identity.

Stomp with the burned message in it.

She choose to use the wood as her media because part of it was from her own personal life. Her father was an amateur wood worker. Not only that but the wood itself is a form of her message about being nature, and who were are inside. The wood was such an earthy medium and not something that is usually associated to identity but I loved the way that themes connected and how she used her own personal life to tie into it all. It makes the work so much more powerful, just standing in the room you can feel the power of her life and the topic being so close to her.

words projected in her code

One of my favorite aspects of the exhibit is the code she uses, it has as much meaning as the medium does. The code is a false binary, meaning it has slashes that slant to the right and slashes that slant to the left that form the letters of the alphabet. The binary part comes from the dual nature of the code which ties back into the subject of identity and male and female. My favorite part was on the far end of the room she had a projector that was projecting the conversation of people onto the wall in her made up code. It was incredibly metaphoric for how society is talking in codes and not saying straight forward what needs to be said about the roles of identity and trans genders.

 

 

Chelsea's poetry translated in her code

The entire exhibit was so naturalist and simple but still incredibly forceful and thought provoking. And listening to her speak about  the exhibit and the passion for her topic and having this conversation with society and there views.

 

 

Wood logs split into two with the poetry burned in to them

 The idea of the split logs was amazing as well the burned pattern of the code looks like it matches the idea of simple and nature both sides of the log represent the male and female them that both are needed to complete one log as well as the poems burned into them. They are poems from Chelsea's own journals and they are representations of her experience with both male and female being transgender herself. There is so much of herself into this exhibit that it was one of the better ones I've seen.

 

 

Code made from wood hanging from the wall with nylons