Hunter Dodrill

A student, dressed in a black suit, standing in a subway car, smiling

Hunter Dodrill is an M.A. candidate in the Anthropology and Education program at Teachers College, Columbia University. His research interests are centered on Queer and transmasculine livelihoods in the Southern United States and explore intersections of identity, family, politics, intimacy, and ideas of 'home' through ethnographic research and multimedia presentation.

TRANSITION (2023)

TRANSITION is a multimodal exhibition documenting the process of transition—in its pain, fear, joy, and healing—presented on Wellesley College’s campus in April 2023. Drawing on mediums ranging from video and photography to sculpture and poetry, the exhibition sought to immerse viewers in the sensorial and emotional lived experience of reckoning with a Queer and trans body. Exploring intersections of identity, politics, family, and religion, TRANSITION was both an artful documentation of the artist’s own experience as a transmasculine individual and a love letter to the wider experiences of being Queer and trans as felt by many across time and place.

Sheets of paper containing typed poetry, suspended by a thin wire in front of a window

in my own words (inkflow)

"I am trans and not transgender or transsexual because I am always changing in every way. There are days for which I am nothing but today I am everything.

Language is the foundation of culture. It is how we communicate and connect with the living, deceased, and stagnant. Through it, we craft descriptions for ourselves to convey to others, yet these are always an approximation at best. An embodied experience, a lived life, cannot be perfectly translated.

I contend there remains beauty in the attempt."

paper, ink, glue, string, time

A body form of a young woman made out of paper-mache book pages, fragmented and held together by suspended string

refraction (at the point of entry, I am disassembled)

"To become myself was to become undone. Imagine the law of halves as applied to the soul – an endless division, never resolved in its splintering. In order to become anything, I first had to experience the dissolution of everything."

paper, glue, water, polyester

Two coin-operated candy machines, filled with crumpled pieces of colored paper containing written secrets

the truth comes at a cost

"To be vulnerable is an act of softness, an exposing of the innermost flesh and fibers which bind us together.

Every risk has the potential for at least two outcomes, diametrically opposed in their desirability.

To be vulnerable is to engage in the risk of truth.

Truth comes at a cost."

metal, glass, construction paper, ink

An eight-foot tall vertical wooden structure, shaped like a coffin

solitude (without a choice, can be a death sentence)

"Perhaps, to be Queer is to, at one point or another, experience a solitude so wide that it cannot be crossed. I would like to say I braved the night, that I did not go gentle, that I was stronger than the calls of doubt and fear and anger. I was none of these things. Draped heavily across my shoulders, the night holds me to a time I cannot forget. It reminds me, in the whispers before bliss, that I am not enough and that I am a freak and that I am a falsehood and – what do you see here?"

plywood, metal screws, cardboard, paint, metallic polycarbonate

A hand weaving a piece of green cloth through a wireframe body form

clothes/armor/costume /disguise

"Fashioning ourselves, both literally and figuratively, is a great act of creation. I invite you to partake in this collective journey, weaving or tying pieces of the fabric provided to the figure. There is no such thing as a private presentation in the public world; to prepare ourselves for what lies beyond is essential."

wire, plastic, fabric