This article is part of Hyperallergic‘s Pride Month Seriesfeaturing an interview with a different emerging or mid-career transgender or non-binary artist each weekday throughout June.
Iowa City-based artist and teacher Meka Jean, known as her alter-ego TJ Dedeaux-Norris (they/them), engages in limitless methods and materials to dissolve the imaginary separations delineating identity dichotomies in our Company. Through rap music, filmed or live performances, textile work, and curated assemblages and installations, Dedeaux-Norris dissects the layers of inherited genetic information that codify prescribed structures of race, class, gender, and occupation. . Their practice shakes up these hardened ideas and their stories, revealing an intrinsic fluidity that serves as the key to personal and broader liberation.
Hyperallergic: What is the current orientation of your artistic practice?
TJ Dedeaux-Norris: My embodied practice extends beyond the studio where I develop performance, edit video, sew textiles, assemble installations and paint in a life-scale inquiry into the interformativity of individual and collective identities and how it manifests in the body and its work over time. I experiment with physical, mental and spiritual modalities, from boxing to chiropractic to cognitive behavioral therapy, to test their conceptual and technical impacts on my work. Here, healing becomes its own medium, both visceral and tangible, as I seek to reconcile the seemingly opposing past and present – rapper and contemporary artist, sex worker and college professor, runaway and mother’s caretaker. – to highlight the necessarily generative nature of difference.
H: In what ways, if any, does your gender identity play a role in your experience as an artist?
TJDN: I am intrigued and attached to a practice of working on my heritage, to the agency of “taking and putting down” (to refer to black vernacular tradition) what is given to me – from previous family generations, but also performances priors of Self, competing art histories, and intersecting imaginaries that impose bodily limits on those of my racial, gender, and class backgrounds. My legacy includes not only epigenetics shaped by the lived experiences of my biological ancestors – a scientific reality that fascinates me – but a broader spectrum of presumption of violability and active resistance to it. I take the time to assess these legacies and transmute them into work that defies boundaries. My work challenges the presumption of people of color and the passive receptivity of female bodied and working class people and subverts the economy of time. I have and take all the time I need. In keeping with Black Feminist tradition, the one thing I can’t afford is dichotomy.
H: Which artists inspire your work today? What are your other sources of inspiration?
TJDN: I want to live a long and peaceful life, where my nervous system is calm, and I wake up and fall asleep easily. It is my inspiration every day. My daily practice of choosing my meals, my thoughts, my work and my rest are all inspired by the whisperers of my ancestors.
H: What are your hopes for the LGBTQIA+ community right now?
TJDN: My hope for our collective community is that our minds, bodies, and spirits have the healing space to (re)integrate and heal from the physical and emotional labor required to simply exist. This healing, I hope, can enable each of us to discern where and with whom we feel safe, valued and loved.
