Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness, 2024-2025. Marbleized ink on composited photographs. Approx. 5.7 x 10.2 inches each. Signed and numbered en verso.
Serving my own bahdy ahdy ahdy, cancer realness.
This is a series about being a trans body in treatment for the gendered disease of breast cancer. It's about being a body in motion, and motion-sickness. And its about being inside a body searching for a way to communicate outside of a language that can't contain it: outside of the side-effects of being born female, and outside the intake forms which don't acknowledge its existence. It is about a physical sickness which is caused by the cure for the disease, and not by the disease itself. It is about the subjectivity of pain, and trying to understand my own body as it is, as it is changed, and as it claps-back on its terms. 'Are you in any pain today?' is a question I've had to answer often in the last 11 months, usually based on a given scale of faces, a diagram of a body, or a number 1 through 10. But pain and feeling ‘sick’ are a lenticular experience. The present gets abstracted. It flip-flops between subject, object, figure, ground, field, tree. You become the young lady, the old woman, the dancer, the wine glass, the green, the yellow, the wallpaper.
I read somewhere that there’s only one neurological pathway for physical sensation. Moving helps with pain because it interrupts the flow by replacing one unpleasant feeling with something else inside that pathway. I can say from experience this is also true for the vast category called nausea, which I can only tame by constant, vigilant, active self-delusion and movement which distracts. Vogueing is a way of moving that mobilizes it's own self-delusion into reality. It frames itself into 'realness.' It gaslights itself into existence, not out of it. It carves out space and time and replaces what was on that runway with a statement of physical presence. So motherdarling, I'm vogueing.
Camille Altay, 2024
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.
