Missy (2020) is a series comprised of photographs, a short film and installation in which I perform my mother’s actions: primping, adjusting, dressing in her home in Columbus, OH. I take on her appearance and gestures to empathize with her. Performing as her to better understand her experiences in times where my queerness has strained yet deepened our bond. Missy intentionally blurs the authorship between mother and child, complicating and celebrating a dialogue across gender, genealogy, and time.

My work is a love letter to my mother, my memories, my lived experiences, and the icons active within it. A deployment of these icons and symbols is a deployment of the self. I am in constant tension between a love of home and the desire to transcend it. My self-portraits act as a political memoir, seducing the viewer into visceral confrontations with the queer body.

As I emulated models of femininity outside of myself as a survival strategy from the fear and shame I felt as a queer adolescent, I could find security in my own. By paying homage to my icons through their iconographies, I reclaim an identity that I was deprived of assigned male at birth.

Jay Elizondo is an artist whose work seduces viewers into visceral confrontations with the trans queer body. She was born in Columbus, OH in 1996. 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 exhibitions in New York including Idol Worship at Smack Mellon, Artist in Focus at Baxter St, The Unspeakable: A Dark Show, Whore Haus at Pfizer Building, Crashing the Party at Plaxall Gallery, Criminalize This! at Amos Eno Gallery, in Miami for 2018 and 2019 Satellite Art Fair and in Columbus for her solo exhibition preMATURE at Byers Gallery. Her curatorial projects include You Remember How Lonely Everything Was in The Beginning at Please Don’t Come to This Show 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 was a resident artist at The Chautauqua School of Art residency in Chautauqua, NY. In 2020 and at The New York Studio Residency Program in Brooklyn, NY in 2016. Elizondo is currently a featured artists for Smack Mellon’s 2021-2022 Hot Picks. She is a recipient of The 2020 Edward Zutrau Memorial Award, The Jeff F Hilson Memorial Fund, The Edith Smilack Fund and a nominee of The 2018 Association of Independent Colleges and Universities of Ohio Award for Excellence in the Visual Arts. Her work has been published in the Brooklyn Rail, Daily Lazy, Sidewalkkilla, Front Runner Magazine, Nobody’s Fashion Week Zine “Issue 1”, That Way Zine “Issue 1” and Hiss Mag “Issue 3”. Elizondo is a co-founder of Please Don’t Come to This Show, an online project space and arts community that reflects on the complex relationship to online omnipresence and digital information through virtual exhibitions, fundraising and more. Elizondo lives and works in New York.