JOSIAH JAMISON
Siah’s practice takes root in community and identity as it manifests in the multiplicity and materiality of the human form. Their work has evolved over the course of their graduate training to reflect their changing perspective on queer subjecthood, visibility, and vulnerability. In the process, their figures have become more dimensional and individualized as the pictorial worlds they inhabit have expanded and softened to accommodate them. The closely constricted spaces, tensed bodies, and piercing gazes characteristic of Siah’s earlier work give way in their triptych, You Won’t Be Alone, If I’m Here (2025), to a broad landscape featuring fully realized portraits of figures arranged comfortably within the composition.
In this new work, Siah represents the inextricably and intricately connected processes of self-realization and joining in community. Each figural grouping in the triptych reveals a different moment in Siah’s growth as a trans individual, thinking through how both the ecstasy of being nurtured and the alienation of being scrutinized have been integral to the course of their identity formation. The work functions as a visual record of their community, simultaneously utopic and accessible, in a language that borrows from nineteenth-century Western academic portraits and genre paintings. Siah’s portraiture emphasizes individual personhood as constructive of community in its non-idealized naturalism, which unites the three panels and their body of work as a whole. The artist’s formal interventions produce a world within the painting that is serene in its mundanity and sheltered from the sense of spectacle commonly tied to the trans experience. Siah works from composite group photographs (that are artworks in their own right) and reimagines them into more muted, monotone scenes. The six women who form the center panel’s central grouping take the place of more predictable academic painting subjects like the nymphs and angels of Bouguereau and Cabanel yet sustain, in a contemporary mode, their same undisturbed ease. They share in leisure and play with their gazes turned towards one another rather than the viewer, creating a mood of belonging within the protected confines of the picture plane.
— Asia Adomanis, OSU Department of History of Art, PhD Student
EXHIBITION DOCUMENTATION BY SAM LO, OSU MFA PHOTOGRAPHY 2026