CALL THIS # NOW!

This music video, written, directed, and shot by Lily Jean Olsen in 2020, serves as an exploration of the theories of Assemblage and gender-performativity in a digital-visual format. The works of critical queer theorists Judith Butler, Jasbir K. Puar, Sara Ahmed, Gloria Anzaldúa meets the Assemblage art of Pablo Picasso, Man Ray, and Robert Rauschenberg in this piece that seeks to queer the boundaries of gender and personhood. The piece follows its queer subject, played by Carter LaCava, struggling to unite, or perhaps simply accept, the contradictory relationships they have with their internal gender identity and how their external presentations serve to project these identities to others. Their masculine form, represented by “traditionally (i.e. Western) masculine” clothing choices and “masculine” emotions such as rage, combats their “feminine” form represented by “feminine dress” and “feminine” emotions such as demureness and sensitivity. The subject seeks to free themselves of gender but finds they cannot escape the perception of others. In the end, they don a checkered morph suit which wipes them of gender, and perhaps even personhood, completely.

This piece represents a point in Olsen’s life in which they were struggling to come to terms with their gender identity - feeling it impossible to free themselves from other’s perceptions of gender. Since then, they have come to accept the reality that we are all assembleges of not only gender, but of race, language, location, ability, and humanity that we have learned via osmosis from the cultural images that surround us. Gender continues to play an essential part in their art, hoping to use creative expression as a tool to shake its audience from their pre-conceived notions of gender, but also of the various constructs that shape our idea of what the world is and should be.