Artist Kayleigh MacDonald
What We Carry
Exhibition Dates: October 13, 2023–November 10, 2023
Opening Reception: October 13, 2023 | 6:00 pm to 8:00 pm
What We Carry is an ongoing photographic investigation of sustained vigilance as a source of trauma. Portraits of women and gender non-conforming individuals with what is physically carried for protection serve as a point of entry for conversations surrounding self-preservation, collective trauma, and recent gender-based legislation.
Artist Exhibition Statement
What We Carry is an ongoing project using portraiture to investigate sustained vigilance as a source of trauma. Through portraits of women and gender non-conforming individuals with what we physically carry on us for protection, viewers are invited to acknowledge the emotional burden such ownership requires.
In our current political climate, personal weaponry is a charged and polarizing topic. What We Carry contains difficult images, including portraits of individuals with guns. This project engages with the nuances and subtleties of weapon ownership, including the paradox of purchasing the very weapons used to target your own community.
Artist Statement & Bio
I was taught the creation story from Genesis as a child, and I have not stopped thinking about Eve ever since. I make pictures informed by identity and established on a matriarchal memory; I think everything I make comes back to Her. Working across a range of photographic processes, I use my image-making to confront concepts of feminine history, the body, and nature’s influence through self-portraits, images of family, process-based landscapes, and documentary work.
Kayleigh MacDonald (b. 1999, Fairfax, VA) is an artist working in the fields of fine art and documentary photography, performance, and glass fabrication. Growing up overseas, she has called Jordan, South Korea, India, and South Africa home, before settling in Virginia where she earned her BFA in Photography and Film from Virginia Commonwealth University School of the Arts. She currently resides in Quincy, MA.
Taylor—Pepper Spray
Curator’s Notes
Kayleigh MacDonald - What We Carry
While the rights of women, transgendered persons, and gender non-conforming persons have been increasingly under attack, harassment, discrimination, and violence to these groups in the United States has been steadily on the rise.
What We Carry is the first public viewing of a continuing body of work by artist Kayleigh MacDonald. In this work, MacDonald is using portraiture to “investigate sustained vigilance as a source of trauma” for women and gender non-conforming individuals.
This exhibit does not in any way condone violence or glorify weapon ownership. Instead, it seeks to engage all of us in trying to understand the complex issues of weapon ownership and the extreme trauma caused by feeling the need to carry such weapons for protection, all because you are a member of a specific demographic.
MacDonald captures individuals revealing what they personally carry to feel safer. In some images, you’ll see that the person chose something that appears less lethal yet more traditional. Her subject Taylor, for example, carries a small pink Pepper Spray Gun almost in an effort to match her clothing. In others, you’ll see direct and powerful weapons of choice, as in her image of Zoe, who holds an assault style weapon. The diversity of the items each of MacDonald’s subjects have chosen, ranging from everyday items such as keys and knives to pepper spray, tasers, and guns, offers additional avenues for discussion, from gender conformity to the very polarizing and endless debate on 2nd Amendment rights.
The images MacDonald has captured demand that the audience see these individuals and acknowledge their sustained fears and desire to protect themselves. Having captured her subjects in their routine settings, it makes the viewer acknowledge the humanity of each subject and of individuals like them in the viewer’s own community.
Kayleigh MacDonald’s images show the diversity of who carries this heavy burden. To look upon these individuals is to acknowledge how they are forced to become their own personal protectors and warriors. The manner in which her subjects are captured could be viewed as a hard slap back against photographs and holiday cards posted on social media by far-right politicians, featuring families holding assault style weapons by their Christmas trees with big, gleeful smiles on their faces. Those images are disturbing, but they become vulgar, intensely disrespectful, and dangerous when they are shared time and time again following the most recent mass shooting or hate crime.
MacDonald’s images ask the viewer to recognize that these persons sadly feel the need to carry protection. They also ask the viewer to ask themselves: What part do I play in allowing or fostering an environment that feeds the culture of violence, that makes these individuals feel the need to constantly be on guard and to constantly feel unsafe?
Within this body of work, many of the subjects are young people. The CDC reports that in the United States, nearly 80% of female sexual assault victims experience their first assault before the age of 25. One out of every six American females is a victim of attempted or completed sexual assault, according to RAINN.
Thanks to ever increasing hostile political rhetoric and legislation, transgendered and non-gender conforming persons are living their lives with targets on their backs. Due to this political rhetoric, along with the noise coming out of far-right politicians and political commentators, 566 anti-trans bills have been introduced across 49 states in 2023 alone. As of August 17, 2023, 358 of these are active.
The Human Rights Campaign reports that “fatal violence disproportionately affects transgender women of color—particularly Black transgender women—and the intersections of racism, sexism, homophobia, biphobia, transphobia, and unchecked access to guns conspire to deprive them of employment, housing, healthcare, and other necessities.”
What We Carry hopes to create a healthy and civil dialogue on the layers of social and political issues encapsulated by this project and body of work.