In this body of work, I am using summer vacations to my family’s cabin in Delta, Ontario as a conceit to examine the transition from adolescence into adulthood as a transgender woman. The vacations acted as an escape from a tense home life and served as checkpoints during my adolescence. Time at the cottage reinforced typical and traditional gender roles, yet somehow relieved the omnipresent domestic tension. The large scale color photographs utilize found objects and fragmented self-portraiture with printed backdrops made from family album photographs and appropriated images to engage with the hyper-masculine space of the cabin and assert my own experience within the multigenerational collective memory of the space.
