Description
ARTISTS STATEMENT
As an infant adoptee and the mother of a trans daughter, I use mixed media to explore themes of reproduction, genetic and cultural lineage, and dysphoria – specifically, adoptees’ desire to resolve bioethnic psychic conflict around seeing the self in the body as transfamily individuals. I am interested in the tensions around questions of what makes “real” family and “real” women and men, and the normative binaries of gender, kin, and “nature vs. nurture” that sustain these questions, frequently employing alternative readings of Catholic iconography. My goals include presenting joyous resolutions of dysphoria without shying away from some of its pain.
ABOUT THE ARTIST
Kim Potowski was raised on Long Island, NY and is a professor at the University of Illinois-Chicago, where two of her photographs have been on exhibit since 2011. Her work has been shown at Chicago’s Afri-Caribe Cultural Center, at Woman Made Gallery, and at Brown University during the 2024 Alliance for the Study of Adoption and Culture conference. Her Wicker Park public art environment was featured in the Intuit Outsider Museum’s magazine in December 2023 and on @chicagobucketlist in November 2024.
© Kim Potowski