Call for Support: Janet Bruesselbach's "Beloved Monsters"

Please consider supporting one of Tribe’s most cherished artists in completing her incredibly beautiful project, Beloved Monsters.

Janet Bruesselbach (she/it) is an artist who has previously done two major solo projects, Teleportraiture and Daughters of Mercury. She has been oil painting since she was twelve. Her work is often either dynamic collaborative portraits or organic and generative psychedelia. She is a bisexual-to-aceflux cis woman who has been involved in queer activism for most of her adult life, particularly through Reclaim Pride in New York City.

Beloved Monsters is her large scale painting series that has been growing slowly since 2016. These fantastical portraits depict fictional beings with humanoid forms, typically those placed in stories as monstrous or villainous. They are modeled by people who fall into the broad umbrella of sexual minorities, including gay, lesbian, trans, nonbinary, intersex, two spirit, and so on. Most are also disabled, and/or neurodivergent - from the autism spectrum to attention and personality disorders to the many manifestations of madness. While the imagery of the paintings uses a pulp science fictional, illustrative and pop surrealist style, the series addresses behavioral othering, and the experience of owning that othering as found in culturally shared narratives.

Beloved Monsters hopes to represent mythological creatures from cultures all over the world, channeled by models with meaningful connection to those cultures. Ethnicity and identity are complex in a globally intertwined world in which myths also use monstering to otherize cultures, and representations are likewise appropriately complicated. Specific depictions also draw from contemporary intertextual sources when I want to pay homage to them. My own perspective is unavoidably Euro-American, and my approach is playful but respectful.

As with all her portraits, these paintings are artifacts of the social experience of live poses and a dialogue with the model. But based on their premise, the human face and body are warped into imaginative configurations, conjoined with animal or mechanical elements. They model the potentialities of not just transgender but transhuman, transgressive, and transcendent fantasy. My own preference is to convert by Clarke’s law and depict magically mutated bodies as technologically feasible. The exploration of identity among all sexual minority communities blossoms into liberation beyond social, economic, and spiritual restrictions. It is this potentiality that mainstream narratives seek to monsterize in order to enforce the supremacy of straight and abled bodies, which is why we often share a contrarian desire to reclaim the inhuman role.

Janet plans to paint something like 20 more portraits in the next year, with a goal of between 23 and 30 paintings in the complete series, but can only devote that time and energy to the work if the project isn’t funded solely out of my own pocket. Janet intends to collect everything into a catalog and exhibit them in a physical space, which this funding would make feasible. Janet hopes that you have something to spare to make it happen and looks forward to sharing a vast and diverse pandaemon of beautiful fearsome creatures.

Janet Bruesselbach an ace-ish Jew-ish white cis woman living and working in New York City. She was raised by scientists in L.A. and has painted oil portraits since she was 12, and legitimized the profession at RISD (BFA, Illustration, 2006) and the New York Academy of Art (MFA, Painting, 2009). When not painting, she’s a science fiction reader, cyberpunk figurant, and former bookstore worker. She has run four successful crowdfunding campaigns, including Teleportraiture.