Northampton visual artist Jacob Clayton, a gay transgender man, spent more of his life in the closet than not. In the last decade, however, he has discovered how to use photography to help himself understand his own identity — and he’s got an upcoming show to celebrate its impact on his life.
Clayton will showcase a short film and four mixed-media self-portraits as part of “We Contain Multitudes: A Curated Collective of 2SLGBTQIA+ and BIPOC Creatives’ Voices” at the Split Level Gallery, located at 33 Hawley St. in Northampton, running through Friday, June 26. The collection directly explores his experience as a transgender man.
“The gift of passing” — that is, when a transgender person is perceived as cisgender — “is a gift and a curse,” Clayton said. “So to be able to come out through art is really a liberation.”
The movie “The Clayton Effect” is his take on “The Kuleshov Effect,” a famous filmmaking technique demonstrated in a short film that juxtaposes footage of an actor’s neutral expression with shots of different subjects: a bowl of soup, a dead girl and a young woman lying down. Audiences purportedly believed the actor’s expression changed each time — perceiving hunger for the soup and pity for the girl — even though the facial footage was identical.
In his own film, Clayton, dressed in a button-down shirt and tie, stares at the door of an all-gender bathroom to a background of jazz music. A man wearing a high-visibility vest and a hard hat walks inside. The film then cuts to close-ups of the man pressing the toilet handle and washing his hands, before cutting to a shot of a thong falling to the ground. Next, the audience sees a hand shaving a leg, then a neck. A woman with long blonde hair walks out holding a purse and a hard hat as Clayton looking somewhat surprised. The entire sequence then repeats, this time with the woman entering the bathroom and emerging dressed as the man, to which Clayton gives a different look of surprise.
The movie is autobiographical.
“Having transitioned 26 years ago, I can tell you that bathrooms have been a longstanding trauma, and it’s been horrible,” Clayton said.
Even with the increasing prevalence of gender-neutral facilities, he wants the piece to provoke dialogue. Among the questions he hopes viewers to consider: “Has that changed people’s views of gender? And how do we still feel about people who maybe don’t represent gender the way that we think [they] should? And how do we feel about people who go in between genders and swap back and forth?”
When asked if the figures inside the bathroom are supposed to be two different people or the same person in different gender presentations, Clayton replied, “You tell me!
“That’s one of the questions I’m trying to put out there,” he said. “Do I think they are? I don’t think so. I think they’re sort of gender-neutral, I think they flow in and out, and I think, ‘What does it matter — but does it matter, and are they different?’”
“For people to question these things and wonder and give thought and ponder and be confused is part of the process that I’m inviting people into, because that’s what my life experience has been like: questioning my own femininity and masculinity and questioning, ‘How do people perceive me?’ and ‘What do I look like?’ and questioning whether people watch me going in and out of men’s rooms or women’s rooms at various points of my life,” he added.
Alongside the film, Clayton is presenting four mixed-media self-portraits: “Becoming Marilyn,” a diptych with a black-and-white photo of himself in a blonde wig on one side and a version of the photo stylized like Andy Warhol’s portrait of Marilyn Monroe on the other; “GOAT,” a portrait of him in boxing gloves and boxing shorts, with his chest covered by a censor bar; “How Many Fifths of a Man Am I?,” which annotates a photo of him with his perceived physical failures as a man, such as “hands TOO soft” and “MISSING Adam’s apple”; and “Supertran,” which is styled like a panel in a superhero comic, in which Clayton stands in front of Washington, D.C. landmarks and obscures his face with a hat that says “FTM,” while a stylized “WOW!” covers his bare chest.
Clayton, whose primary career is in web development and system administration, began creating this body of work in 2017 at the suggestion of a therapist. He already had photography experience from high school and college, but reached a pivotal turning point.
“I wanted to come out as a transgender man, and I really didn’t know how,” he said.
After spending so many years in the closet, he added, “I wasn’t sure how to navigate it, and I wasn’t even sure how to make sense of my own life.” Ultimately, photography offered him a path to self-acceptance.
“What art has allowed me to do is find a way to make some sort of sense of my life circumstances,” Clayton said.
When he began photographing himself, it was “the first time I was really able to see myself as the man I had known I was all along. It was really the very first time, and it pretty much changed everything.”
In the same vein, he noted that exhibiting work like this is vital for bringing visibility to transgender men. He strongly disagrees with the notion that, as a transgender man, he has “crossed over to the other side” and “become the enemy.” Instead, he wants his art to showcase the nuances of “the actual transgender male experience.”
“To this day, I don’t believe I’ve seen a transgender man’s artwork on a wall in a museum. And it’s really hurtful to wake up every day and to know that there are other trans kids coming up and they’re not seeing fine art [by transgender people]” in museums,” he said. “And it’s sad.”
“If we keep putting our work out there, hopefully we get shown,” he added. “And hopefully, we get that recognition, and then we see ourselves recognized. We see ourselves, and then we become less invisible.”
In addition to the show at 33 Hawley, Clayton also has work on display as part of the Berkshire LGBTQ+ Pride Art Exhibit: Amplifying Queer Creativity at the Becket Arts Center. Located at 7 Booker Hill Road in Becket, the exhibition runs through July 5.
For more information about Jacob Clayton, visit jacobclayton.com.
