Clarissa Sligh ~ North Carolina

Wrongly Bodied:
Documenting Transition from Female to Male
By Clarissa T. Sligh
Philadelphia: Leeway Foundation, 2009. Edition of 1500.

7.75 x 5"; 160 pages. Printed offset. Perfect bound. Paper illustrated wrappers. Includes essays by Carla Williams, Jake in Transition from Female to Male series, or, Through the Mirror and What Clarissa Found There and Silvia Roncucci, Women in Transition: From Female to Male (translated from Italian). Signed by the author.

Prospectus: "Wrongly Bodied relates the stories of Jake, a contemporary white male imprisoned in a woman's body, as he transitions from female to male, and Ellen Craft, a 19th century black slave woman who escapes to Philadelphia from Georgia by passing as a white male slave owner. Working as staff support at a small woman's college in Denton, Texas, and in the US Army reserves, Jake had been a female soldier in Operation Desert Storm in 1991. Sligh and Jake worked together over four years to document his journey. What results is a book of photographs and texts that take us inside what became a highly transformative journey for the photographed and the photographer."

Clarissa Sligh, Premise: "When Debra approached me about documenting her transition from female to male, from Debra to Jake, I felt confronted by several personal dilemmas. It was a world that was new to me. In my long career as an artist/photographer, I was always interested in social identity and the general human condition but did not want to be an advocate for any particular person or 'speak' for someone else.

"In addition to the world of transitioning from one gender to another being new to me, Debra, herself had many questions: As a woman she had to dissolve, disintegrate, disappear – what would the journey be like? What if she failed to complete her transition? What if she didn’t like the person she was to become? Who would want to have such a person in their life?

"A person’s decision to change gender is very difficult for many people to wrap their heads around. I trusted that working together with Jake on this project, I would develop the necessary identification with her life and struggles but my affinity came from an unexpected place for me. In my trying to understand Jake’s motivation for a gender change, I used, from my own social history, racial passing – as a parallel that could be thought of as something like it although it is not.

"As I reflected, for over ten years, on my experience with the intensity of Jake’s transition, the narrative of Ellen and William Craft’s successful escape from slavery to freedom by Ellen 'passing' as a white male, began to insert itself into my page layouts of Jake’s story. For the first time, I understood that Ellen Craft was passing as white and as a man. While Jake would never think of himself as passing for a man, I gained a deeper understanding of what it meant for Craft to present herself as a man in ante-bellum America.

"In Wrongly Bodied, Jake’s story and the Crafts’ narrative lay side by side. No attempt was made to intermingle or align them, yet resonances between the two occur throughout. The insertion of the Craft’s journey from slavery to freedom has expanded the scope of the project and makes clear that the book is about Jake and also about the photographer.

"Photographer Ellen Eisenman noted that, 'The addition of the Craft’s narrative contributes to the book’s accessibility to people who have not been able to understand the social construction of gender and makes clear the documentary photographer’s process of observation, of really trying to see and understand from the subject’s point of view."
$29.95

It Wasn't Little Rock
By Clarissa T. Sligh
Rochester, New York: Visual Studies Workshop, 2005. Edition of 150.

8 x 11"; 74 pages. Printed on an Indigo Digital Press. Spiral bound in laminated covers.

Prospectus: "The Supreme Court's historic ruling, in the 1954 case of Brown vs. Board of Education, that state-sanctioned segregation of public schools by race was unconstitutional, provided a judicial framework for school desegregation that was tested community by community – often school by school. It Wasn't Little Rock is a telling of stories about Ethel Mozelle Thompson, the daughter of a sharecropper from North Carolina, who entered her children, including Clarissa Sligh, in school desegregation lawsuits that placed them in white schools. But the story line doesn't end there. It is written in the voices of those children, a grandchild, and great-grandchild. Family snapshots, news clippings, letters, and excerpts from legal documents and interviews are intertwined in a personal story of struggle, anger, pride – and the revelation of a family tragedy that led Ethel, a quiet, reserved, 'colored' woman to her activism."

Clarissa Sligh: "In this book, the artist sought to understand what motivated her mother, a quiet, reserved, seemingly passive but determined 'colored' woman who grew up in the South, to offer up her children as plaintiffs in the Arlington school class action suits. It is a personal struggle, anger, pride and the revelation of a family tragedy that led Ethel to her activism."
$75

Voyage(r): A Tourist Map to Japan
By Clarissa T. Sligh
Atlanta Georgia: Nexus Press, 2000. Edition of 800.

5 x 7.25"; 144 pages. Printed offset in duotones on Mohawk Options paper. Smythe sewn. Illustrated paper wraps. Encased in lined cloth pouch. Signed by author.

Prospectus: "In this diary-like artist's book, Sligh recounts a trip to Japan through a thoughtfully constructed montage of photography, texts, and abstract gestural paintings. In personal and poetic musings, the author ponders her relationship to Japanese culture, both as a first time visitor and as an African American woman."

Clarissa Sligh: "This work comes out of a visit with people and places in Japan. It is also based on research of the historical circumstances surrounding the United States decision to drop the Atomic Bomb on Japan and reflections on what visiting Hiroshima meant to me as an American."
$50

Reading Dick and Jane with Me
By Clarissa T. Sligh
Rochester, New York: Visual Studies Workshop, 1989. Edition of 800.

7 x 8.375"; 24 unnumbered pages. Offset photo-lithograph. Pamphlet stitched. Signed by Sligh.

Clarissa Sligh: "Reading Dick & Jane with Me (1989) is an artist's book created to interrupt the authority of old elementary school textbooks called The Dick and Jane Readers. These reading textbooks of the 1940's and 50's represented a white upper middle class suburban family as normal life for most Americans. Although statistically the average American at this time was working class, the artist as a young girl thought these depictions meant that her family must be an aberration outside the norm. In Reading Dick and Jane with Me, children from Clarissa's old neighborhood stand in for the young people who could never talk back at that time."

Sligh underscores the covert, powerful, and potentially dangerous messages sent to young readers when the power of literature, even of the most elemental sort, is backed by the authority (both on a real and spiritual level) of the school. What happens when the young don't see themselves or their worlds reflected in the models foisted upon them?

The simplicity of this book's format doesn't conceal the complexity of the issue or the peril of the possible consequences.
$150