“Bring Your Own Body,” a showcase of historical documents and contemporary art at Columbia College’s Glass Curtain Gallery, aims to highlight self-identified transgender histories as opposed to narratives by those outside the transgender community. In this show, trans artists decide how their community is documented, and they do it through various mediums.
The collaged titles within Vargas’s work were pulled from sources at the Kinsey Institute at Indiana University, which also provided some of the historical photography of trans individuals presented toward the back of the exhibition, or near the beginning of the time line. However, in some black-and-white images of trans subjects it is not apparent whether the anonymously shown individuals self-identified as trans or were simply paid to pose for research purposes. For this reason the images are presented in the exhibition as purely archival material in need of critical intervention, explicitly linked to art made by contemporary transgender voices.
