Camille Altay

Pain/Vogue/Cancer/Realness 2024-2025.

Hand-marbled ink on composited photographs. Approx. 5.7 x 10.2 inches each. Signed and numbered en verso.

This body of work emerges from the artist’s experience of cancer treatment and recovery, using voguing as a method for metabolizing pain and reclaiming bodily agency. Pigment floats, disperses, and settles through gesture and gravity, mirroring fluid processes of healing, instability, and adaptation. Voguing operates as a low-cognitive, ritualized action—striking poses becomes a way to regain autonomy over a body made unfamiliar by illness. Through repetition and movement, pain is transformed into presence, and vulnerability becomes a site of agency and care.

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 AFAB. It is about a physical sickness caused by the cure for the disease, not the disease itself. It is about the subjectivity of pain, and trying to understand my own body as myself, as cancerous, as at war, as it is changed, and as it claps-back.

'Are you in any pain today?' is a question I've had to answer often since April 2024, 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 as well as one's sensation of presence get abstracted - flip-flopping between subject, object, figure, ground, field, tree. One becomes the young lady, the old woman, the dancer, the wine glass, the green, the yellow, the wallpaper.

According to neuroscience, there’s only one neurological pathway for physical sensation. Vogueing is a way of moving that mobilizes it's own self-delusion into reality. It frames itself into being by declaring its own 'realness' instead. Moving helps with pain because it interrupts that singular pathway by replacing an unpleasant feeling with something else. During my chemotherapy, this also turned out to be true for the vast category called nausea, which I was able to tame somewhat by constant, vigilant self-delusion and distracting movement. So motherdarling, I'm vogueing.

Camille Altay, 2025

Pain Vogue/Cancer Realness. Hand dipped acrylic monoprint, inkjet photo on rag paper. 6x10 inches.

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