Paula Mascuch (they/them) is a multidisciplinary artist from Brooklyn. They seek to explore gender and queerness through a mix of critical theory and art. They work across different mediums to explore the limits of how we are taught to see our bodies and relationships, recently finding a home in multi-media collage.
Artist Statement
My work is concerned with the current and historical attempts to label, categorize, and norm trans people and our bodies. I focus on new and alternative iterations of the body to destabilize the figure as the only way to understand gender and trans-ness. I utilize queer theory with my art practice to create new definitions and understanding around the “Human”, the non-human, subject/object formations, transness and queerness. In the creation of an alien of the family, I mess with the strict confines of domestic space and family structures as well as show a multiplicity of forms the “body” can take.
My interdisciplinary art practice combines drawing, embroidery, sculpture, and painting to create alternative modes of representation and expression. In particular, I am intrigued by the intimacy of the sewn and the stitched in both the creation of a new way of being in a body and also as an art practice. I am constantly curious to explore the ways in which bodies and materials are in flux and how transforming materials can transform the body in unexpected ways. I am interested in collage both as an art practice and as making a whole of disparate parts. Furthermore, in my practice I locate textile work and collage as resistant crafts. Through the repetition of symbols and shapes that both represent my body and don’t , I position my trans body as leaky and uncontainable.