Gender Dysphoria In The Time Of Korona with Shane Dixon

From the bio of Mx. Dixon:

Shane Dixon is a digital and mixed media artist whose diverse body of work explores fusion of oppositional polarities, transcendental themes, abstract symbolism, and humankind's unique role within the natural world. Leah Shane's unique color sense gives their work cohesion across multiple media and styles and has served as a unifying thread throughout multiple phases of their output. A graduate of Pratt Institute and the Los Angeles County High School for the Arts, Leah Shane draws from their bi-coastal life experience, informed by the rich tapestry of artistic, historic, cultural, literary, musical and filmic trends of both Los Angeles and New York City. A second-generation computer geek, Leah Shane fuses the practices of digital- and video-based art making with the foundation art practices of drawing, painting, installation, and photography. In addition to their active art practice, Leah organizes themed group art shows and other curatorial projects.

All of that is true, but I've  known Shane for roughly 8 years now and I will always think of him as my oddball, artistic friend. They of the sharp wit, acute intellect and boundless curiosity.

What follows is a lively (if perhaps disjointed) conversation/interview that has taken place over the past week via a string of emails.

You've adopted new pronouns since last we spoke, correct? How should I write about you?

I use they/them or he/him, either are fine, just no feminine descriptors of any kind. Thanks for asking.

How are you doing, my friend? How's your physical health? Your mental health? How's your mom?

I’m tolerably OK in 2020. I had top surgery last September, which both was a temporary setback and a longer-term gain. I move totally different in the world and I’m happier when I’m alone. It has even changed the quality of my sleep. Health is good - minor spills once in a while, but basically fine. My mom is also in good health, and we’re weathering isolation reasonably well so far.

You're in San Pedro, right?

My studio is in San Pedro, I live in Long Beach. The studio is the one place I can go without making contact with another human’s airspace so it’s my one destination outside of basic necessities.

 What's the most disheartening thing you've witnessed since this crisis started?

The most disheartening thing I’ve seen so far continues to be the emerging fascism: the politics of shock-and-awe times smash-and-grab. 

Other things may piss me off, individual actions or failures to act, but what will remain my primary area of concern is yet another hard shove rightward like post-9/11, enabled by the con man and grifter occupying the Oval Office and his menagerie of bad faith operators, helped along by much of their ‘loyal opposition’.

Is that too vague of an answer? Were you looking for more of a slice of life vignette?

I’ve been avoiding people enough that I don’t really have any good ones to report. But if you really want to experience the feeling of looking into the abyss of the 2020 zeitgeist and having it look back at you, find the video of Sarah Palin in a blue and pink fur suit singing ‘Baby Got Back’.  It’s nearly every bit as disturbing as Tiger King but it only takes a few minutes instead of seven hours, and no actual animals were harmed in the making of it either.

Why did you do that to me?!

The other day Trump trotted out "Christian Mike" of My Pillow fame. Mike says "read the bible!"

Do you think God came to Mike one day and gave him the idea for his pillow?

That’s between God and Mike. I’m unacquainted with his pillow.

I take it television isn't a drug you consume?

Busted. I do avoid TV news, fast forward and/or mute all commercials (and quietly die inside when other people don’t do the same when I’m around), and especially in 2020 I’ve been keeping most mainstream news at a distance. I get almost all of my news online and occasionally friends will clue me in to something or other.

What are your go-to news sources?

It’s a rotation of a wide range of news sources. I look at stuff like the NYT and WaPo with some suspicion, I look at lots of regional newspapers websites, I look at Democracy Now! And Al-Jazeera and TeleSUR, I look at Truthout and a buncha lefty, anti-fascist, anti-capitalist, and anarchist media chatter. I’m trying to read things that platform the people who usually get swept aside: black and indigenous activists, disabled activists, labor activists, and environmental activists. I do browse rightward media and/or mainstream news media but with a critical eye and always in context of the larger picture, always trying to read for subtext and what’s not being said.

Also, honestly, I read a lot of memes in my various politics and interest groups social media feeds. Anyone who’s not at least somewhat fluent in meme culture is missing out on one of the most white-hot venues for communication that we have presently. A good meme can cause a person to ask the necessary questions and seek out the context to understand a complicated idea, from something that seems transitory and disposable.

Coming back to pillow guy and the Trump/Pence regime. The worse the current administration gets, the deeper the propaganda pileup, the more the gaslighting and the spin are employed, the more vicious assholes double down on the support of utterly amoral parasites that have wholly co-opted our public institutions, the more I see their words and ideas as utterly harmful to consume in nearly any quantity. Anyone who has ever spent any amount of time being gaslit in an abusive relationship will likely recognize many of the same earmarks in how they handle public relations. I don’t need anything these shysters are selling.

So, fastidious consumerism then?

I do have to be careful about what I consume, emotionally/psychically. It’s part of my daily habits to maintain an even keel. 

I don’t know if I’ve mentioned expressly, but in addition to having PTSD for sure, along with its co-morbid handmaidens anxiety and depression, I also suspect I may be somewhere on the autism spectrum (95% certainty) and if I was also somewhat ADHD that wouldn’t surprise me at all. 

My PTSD is the single most salient factor informing my politics. Understanding the effects of trauma on the brain and understanding oppression, slavery, genocide and systematic poverty as a form of inter-generational PTSD has placed me squarely on the side of all the planet’s liberation movements. 

It’s important for me to manage the amount of PTSD ‘kindling’ lying around, too much kindling and one spark can ignite and then anything I might want to be doing has to turn into damage control and recovery. A lot of firm boundary management prevents things from conflagration.

The Donald does seem to represent a trauma being inflicted on a nation. I'm not being flippant when I say that.

I just googled about the Pillow guy. I didn’t click enough to read articles, but he sounds like wall to wall bullshit. I would literally rather go to the dentist or jury duty than subject myself to it. But HAHA! Can’t do either of those things now.

Trump is constantly saying "when you look at..." and "if you look at..." to justify some deep state conspiracy or other. What do you think HE'S looking at, other than Fox News?

Bags of money waiting to be acquired by hook or by crook (usually the latter) and also the nagging sense that no one has ever truly loved him.

Let's talk about your art a bit. I know you work a lot in the digital realm. You refer to yourself as a visual explorer. Describe your process.

My process has a lot of experimentation: I’ll often work on batches of whatever my mode is at a time, and I’ll arrive at the final pieces by months or even years of editing, adding, and modifying. It is not a linear process at all.

I was nearly entirely digital for a solid 18 years (1998-2016) but in the last handful of years I have leaned more into paint, to where I’m doing 90%+ paint now. For the moment I’m employing paint by itself, but I have aspirations to eventually not only take up more digital creation again but to actually fuse the two processes in a single object: so I’ll either start with digital and paint on top of it, or start with paint and then collage digital elements in.

Presently I’m still getting a handle on paint; I have begun a small number of paint-on-digital experiments that aren’t yet ready to show but now have a robust series of biomorphic acrylic abstractions that are really starting to deepen. I’m also playing with a process where I will map out a specific kind of tessellated pattern that I project onto a canvas, trace out with a paint pen, and then continue: so even though all the physical work is analog, the pattern originated with a digital assist, but that hasn’t evolved to where I want it yet. I typically have a lot of layering going on, whether it’s paint or digital. Regardless of medium, I want to create objects that can reward sustained attention.

One of the nice things about working analog now, is that I can see more immediately how my works look in relation to each other as a normal part of creating them. I am constantly grouping my art side by side and in close groupings to see how they work and play together. But also, I’m coming to understand the therapeutic value of just pushing a little blob of goo around on a surface.

Are your images at all informed by experiences with LSD?

Yes.

Do you have a memory of when you first connected with art in a profound way?

I was 15 and I was painting in my room at home. I was very, very troubled at 15. I now know that I’ve had PTSD since I was about 10, if not earlier, but at the time I was unaware of this and just miserable. Puberty and adolescence also sucked and I now recognize some of the pain of that time as gender dysphoria, and that meant that while everyone else was becoming more active with teenage courtship & dating, I was completely stymied as to how to navigate the idea of dating or teenage relationships authentically. The cognitive dissonance of that, combined with the ongoing trauma of living with an abusive adult, was inescapable and constantly weighed on me without me really knowing. 

So, my memory is painting at age 15, while listening to a cassette tape that I’d copied from my vinyl album of the Wang Chung soundtrack to the movie To Live and Die in LA. It’s one of the only ‘cop movies’ I enjoy and partly because it’s the artiest one I’ve ever seen. Although they are mainly known for the big eponymous party down song, Wang Chung were like the avant-garde classical cats of 80s new wave, and I still appreciate what they were trying to bring to the world of pop music back then.

The second side of that album is all instrumental and that was one of my primary painting soundtracks. The first track of the instrumental side (“City of Angels”) starts with kind of drones and atonal notes and a formless musical soup, and then pivots into this driving bass and drum beat with occasional electric guitar fills.

The abstract musical soup would help gently dissolve whatever reality was bugging me and then the driving beat would take me somewhere new while I created. Sitting there, in my room, I could depart this world, painting or maybe pastel drawing in time to the music, seeing the colors changing shape and emerging into forms that never existed until I made them. I could be somewhere else, be someone else. It was totally a self-medicating thing and, in many ways, still can function that way for me.

That memory also factors into my return to paint a few years ago.

Doesn’t TO LIVE AND DIE IN L.A. have a young Willem Dafoe, playing a troubled artist turned counterfeiter?’

Yes, one of the things that makes TLADILA extra arty is the main villain is literally a frustrated artist who prints money using his art skills. Living the dream! I also love the little gender bendy moment with Rick’s bi girlfriend. a smidge of queer representation in a genre that rarely features that in a humanized manner.

I do want to briefly circle back to what you were saying about memes, because I loathe memes, and I say this as a person who created and posted one yesterday, so I'm a hypocrite.

But memes are, in large part, how The Orange Menace was elected in the first place. Nerve striking in concise, shareable bursts. The Orwellian cautionary tale has taken firm root. Are memes funny? Meh. 

Who named them memes though. That's a story I wanna get to the bottom of, (without having to Google it).

People do credit Richard Dawkins with coining the term ‘meme’. But seriously, memes and shitposting are one of my few pleasures in this dystopian hellscape.

Yes, they can have bad effects and people can use them for horrible ends, but I think you could arguably say that about any human mode of expression. Try some anarcho-communist/antifa/anticapitalist memes, they’re a delightful counterpoint to the MAGA memes.

Oh, Dawkins. That scans. Then maybe we're all a virus.

Depends on your point of view I suppose. There’s a definite thread of ‘HuMaNs ArE tHe ViRuS’ in the discourse that I don’t really agree with.

I think there’s specific humans that behave with the ideology of the cancer cell: growth for growth’s sake, at the cost of the host organism (Earth) and nearby living tissue (other humans). These specific humans have names and addresses and generally all sit atop a mountain of either capital or biddable human minions or both. 

It also comes back to the principle of understanding all things by contrast; if we’re all a virus, then none of us really are, and there’s nothing different we should be doing, which I’ll just... disagree with.

I suspect that comment was lighthearted gallows humor though, so we don’t need to parse it too closely.

What was the last book you read?

Last book I read was "Parable of the Sower" by Octavia Butler.

Coincidentally, the last major cultural event I attended just before the lockdown was a rock opera musical theatre production of... Parable of the Sower by Octavia Butler. ‘What’s it about?’ you ask? Oh, you know, just a plucky woman of color protagonist living in a post-apocalyptic Greater Los Angeles of the 2020's, daring to dream of building a better world whilst fighting for her life and the lives of the rag-tag band of people that accompany her. 

Hmm. Sounds like science fiction. Are we edging closer to global anarchy?

If you mean anarchy in the ‘distributed self governance and mutual aid’ sense, I’d say only in pockets, but those pockets (which already exist) will grow.

If you mean anarchy in the sense of dissolution of existing governments, I don’t think we’re quite there yet, and there’s going to be some heavy birthing pains that have to happen to bring that about, not to mention several more impossible-to-predict game changing events that will probably define the 2020's.

I think we’re likely to see various blends of different "Isms" in the coming days. As old systems break down, new ones will arrive to fill the void. Some of the changes will happen extremely rapidly.

I think the changes of how our world society is organized have already begun to take hold and it’s anyone’s guess who will be standing or in what configuration when the smoke clears.

It’s too big for any one individual to steer in any fine-tuned sense, but we can all lean into the kind of future we’d want to live in, starting with survival but always with a mind towards the pivot from surviving to thriving and building something new and hopefully better than what came before. But we’ll also be doing this while mourning heavy losses, devastating losses. But for now: we look after ourselves, look after our family, friends, neighbors, peers, and community, look after the ecosystems we all depend on. We dream of a new day, a better world.

Every day, the sun comes up and we (those who remain after others are taken from the world) have new possibilities. Every breath we draw is a victory. Every piece of art we make that isn’t in lockstep with the emerging fascism is a victory. Every strand of the web of community we weave by keeping ourselves alive another day and reaching out to other humans is one more stitch in our own social fabric. As artists our job in all this is both more challenging and more vital than ever before.

Thanks for that unexpected shot of positivity. I've had trouble locating that reflex lately.

So, the question I've been asking everybody...

How do you think this ends?

I’ll answer this with two quotes

First I’ll quote the Bard himself: ‘What’s past is prologue.’ 

Everything that’s happening today has 20-40-100-250-500 years of prologue (depending on your lens). In that time, how many worlds ended so that this one could exist? One day, 2020 will be regarded as the prologue to a whole new story that emerges from the chaos and instability of this time. It’s scary but it’s also exciting. 

Second, I’m going to quote Dr. Manhattan: Nothing ever ends.