WHY DOES IT NEVER FEEL LIKE RAPE? is an emotional body of work centered around my experience with sexual abuse as a young transgender person. Through photographs taken from my everyday sights and textual elements sourced from personal digital chats, my work investigates what remains after sexual violence once the body moves on, what’s left behind in the mind of the victim.  
This piece serves as a vehicle for the memories I can’t let go of, as well as a way of making sense of what happened. I attempt to render visible the ongoing and ever-present, intimate work of memory as I move through my daily life. With intentionally raw, unaltered and visceral prose, I want to focus on the violence of recalling when we wish we couldn’t and what living looks like after surviving. I am exploring the duality between the violence of traumatic memory yet its elusiveness, and the difficulty in communicating an accurate account of the events that took place. WDINFLR? is deliberately upfront and provocative because rape is an inherently violent crime and should be addressed as such. Contemporarily, memory preserves us and can make past experiences and images challenging to access. 
Through a combination of the media we hold closest to us when it comes to remembering, I wish to shed light on a new side of the marginalized queer experience that often goes overlooked or avoided in societal debates. Similar to the fatality of the events I depict, I wish for viewers to be confronted with what survivors silently carry, so shame can change sides. My work aims to invite viewers to sit with the uncomfortable, to break stigmas, generate conversation and understanding surrounding sexual assault and queerness.