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Ash Kolodner: GAYFACE really changed how I think about portraiture. It’s not just about capturing what someone looks like—it’s about permission, about trust, about what it means to be seen and to be witnessed. Photographing so many queer and trans people across the country, I saw this incredible range of lives and experiences, but also this shared complexity around visibility—how powerful it can be, how tender, and sometimes how risky. It also shifted how I think about the role of art. I wasn’t just making portraits—I was part of something more collective, like contributing to an archive of queer life. That feels especially important right now, when trans lives are so often treated as if they’re new or somehow abstract. They’re not. We’ve always been here—across time, across cultures. Holding onto that continuity feels really central to the work. And I think there’s always this tension around visibility. It can absolutely carry risk—that’s real. But invisibility has its own kind of harm. So the work becomes a way of saying: we’re here, we’ve always been here, and our lives are far more expansive than the narrow ways they’re often framed. ML: Surface and Gesture began alongside your gender transition — a period when you needed a medium that could hold what language couldn’t. How did painting allow you to process aspects of that experience that felt inaccessible through words or photography? Ash Kolodner: I think for me, transition was never something that could be summed up just as identity. It was—and is—temporal, physical, psychic, relational… all of it at once. And there were parts of that experience that language could get close to, but not really hold. Words tend to push toward clarity before you’re actually ready to be clear. Painting doesn’t ask for that. So I found myself turning to painting because it could hold more. Through layering, gesture, density, color—I could stay inside that complexity without having to explain it. I didn’t need to narrate the experience for it to be there. Abstraction, especially, let me get closer to something true. It could be both reflective and permeable at the same time—like a mirror, but also something you can move through. It gave me a way to register that sense of instability and vitality, that feeling of becoming, without reducing it to something fixed or illustrative. ML: Do you remember the first painting where you thought: something is genuinely shifting here? Ash Kolodner: Yeah—it wasn’t some big, dramatic shift. It was actually pretty quiet. I just remember realizing at a certain point that I wasn’t trying to make an image in the usual way anymore. I was trying to create an encounter. And that felt like the real turning point. After that, I stopped feeling like the painting had to resolve into something clearly legible for it to be true. It just needed to have its own internal necessity. Once that clicked, I started trusting abstraction in a different way—trusting intuition, accumulation, the intelligence of gesture. It felt like the painting could know something before I had the words for it. ML: The titles of your works — Cocoon Heist, Petty in Pink, Under the Mango Trees, Self Betray — feel poetic and elusive. How do language and