Phantom Intimacies, Stéfy McKnight
A series of CMYK prints in 6 light boxes with black frames, containing collages with a white male subject, overlaid in various colours and distortions in pink, blue, yellow, and green.
Title: Phantom Intimacies
Artist: Stéfy McKnight
Date: 2022 - ongoing
Medium/Materials: Collage, digital print
Dimensions: 6 lightboxes, 20.32 cm x 27.94 cm each, 101.6 cm x 50.8 cm total
Form/Genre: Digital Art Collage
Key Terms/Subject/Tags: Chronic pain; Mutual aid; Love; Healing
Artist Statement:
While marriage for some champions love and commitment, for others, particularly queer and trans couples, it is a pledge to mutual aid. Phantom Intimacies visualize a companionship that braids the unique needs of a non-binary bipolar artist and a trans scholar with chronic pain. Leaving space for complexities that challenge frameworks of care, intimacy, healing, collaboration (between artist and subject), and failure.
The subject of these collages is Stéfy McKnight’s partner. The collages highlight scarring from gender affirming surgery, superimposed with imagery of our pets, and imaginaries of how one may visually understand chronic pain.
The meaning and adaptation of this work has changed over the course of its creation. McKnight hoped the process of creation would be a loving collaboration between them and their partner, a love letter of sorts, of how they worked to incorporate new ways of healing and care, during the COVID-19 pandemic. Though, it failed. Intimacy and closeness bred moments of assumptions or flexibility, or slippages, where, as the artist, McKnight made creative decisions based on their definition of care, eagerness to create, and artistic anxiety. This failure, however, has generated new ways of thinking through queer and disabled intimacy. Particularly, how care work is slippery work, as Shayda Kafai signals, and may be imperfect despite our good intentions because our visions of care won’t always work to fit those we are caring for. Failing caringly, in artmaking, gives us the ability to “look lovingly and expansively beyond the moment to discover what we need to change and what we need to develop the next time around (Kafai, 2021).”
Cultural Context / Story Behind the Work:
This work was created during the COVID-19 pandemic which responds to McKnight and their partner’s experience with disability, mutual aid, queerness, and navigating pain through collaboration.
Rights for this Image:
This digital image is licensed under CC BY-NC 4.0. You are free to share it for non-commercial purposes, as long as you credit the artist.
Learn More:
Instagram: @stefymcknight