MY JESUS IS ALIVE FOREVERMORE

collage and photography

lenticular print on print

12 x 18 inches, framed 

Lenticular print consisting of Jesus Christ’s face on a young Wendell Ramos’s body transitioning into a scanned image of a male anus, smacked on a multilayered photo of my room with disco lights.

This process of disidentification aims to navigate the blurred lines of how I define my own version of Filipino queerness that was suppressed by Christianity deriving from American colonization and indoctrination which my parents heavily laid its faith in. My parents and grandparents have been ministers and devotees of Christian Protestantism for as long as I remember. This sacrilegiously questions the idea of the holiness and purity of Jesus Christ which my parents weaponized to suppress the queerness of my sexual identity. Thus, to invalidate the idea of Jesus Christ’s’ holiness and purity invalidates its oppressive ideologies that I need to unlearn to heal. To also portray Jesus Christ as a sex symbol like the young Wendell Ramos validates the queerness of my sexual awakening that I was invalidated of.

PAUL JATAYNA