JULIAN ROBBINS
The stories of Early Christian saints’ lives are rife with tales of miracles and transformation and serve as sources of wonder for both the spiritual and secular alike. Multimedia artist Julian Robbins’s background in linguistics and book conservation has led aer to focus on the areas of language, history, and narrative through 3D digital creation, the printed image, written word, and sculpture. As seen in aer current work, The Life of Marinos, Robbins is particularly interested in the lives of the “transvestite saints,” a group of holy figures who were assigned female at birth but lived their lives as men. It is through these figures, particularly the Byzantine saint Marinos the Monk, that Robbins explores aer own experiences as a transgender and neurodivergent person.
Utilizing three-dimensional digital technology, Robbins creates a series of looped vignettes, which tell part of the story of Marinos’s life as a monk. They include the time when the monk was accused of fathering a child with an innkeeper’s daughter. Both the innkeeper and the abbot of the monastery admonished Marinos, who accepted the charges, stating “I have sinned as a man.” When he is finally allowed back into the monastery after caring for the child, he ultimately dies there. Upon preparing the body for funeral, the monks realize that he could not have been the one who impregnated the woman, and the innkeeper and abbot both repent their actions.
Robbins’s digital “gospels” connect the histories of past trans figures with modern day, gender-variant individuals’ experiences and, in doing so, fight against the belief that the trans community is transgressive against some cultural moral authority. By the same token, Robbins’s choice to highlight Marinos’s life also allows those within today’s trans community to see themselves as belonging to a longer, sacred history—one that includes instances of both virtue and acceptance.
— Anothony Del Aversano, OSU Department of History of Art, PhD Student
EXHIBITION DOCUMENTATION BY SAM LO, OSU MFA PHOTOGRAPHY 2026