Wednesday, March 5 @ 5:00 – 6:15pm
Elvehjem L160
FREE & OPEN TO THE PUBLIC
Finn Enke grew up on the eastern shore of Lake Michigan attuned to the ever-changing meeting places of land, water and sky. When they were four-years-old, construction of a twin-reactor nuclear power plant less than half a mile away caused erosion that sent homes toppling over the dunes. Witnessing this and other environmental devastations while simultaneously growing up unintelligible (transgender before we had much language for it), they became preoccupied with creation, destruction, and the interplay of visible and nonvisible aspects of embodiment and the environment. How, in the face of violence and loss, do we stay open to love and connection with all that is? How, when capitalism and fear make a mockery of all that sustains life, do we embrace transformation and the unknown? These themes continue to shape their artistic imagination and expression through watercolor, ink, and other mixed-2D media.
Enke is professor of history and gender studies at University of Wisconsin-Madison. They are currently finishing a collaged graphic memoir, With Finn and Wing: Archive of an Amphibious Childhood in a Nuclear Age, and a comics collection, Pedagogies of the Impossible: From the Trans on Campus Corpus. Enke is author of Finding the Movement: Sexuality, Contested Space, and Feminist Activism (2007) and editor of the award-winning Transfeminist Perspectives Within and Beyond Transgender and Gender Studies (Temple, 2012). Their visual art has been published on the covers of South Atlantic Quarterly and Transgender Studies Quarterly, and in the pages of numerous books and journals including Another Chicago Magazine, South Atlantic Quarterly, TSQ*, National Art Education Association Women’s Caucus Lobby Activism: Feminism(s) + Art Education, Gender Considered, and History of Queer America. finnenke.com