A side effect of shooting the calendar and attending live events as Little Miss Cleveland on a regular basis for several years was that I began to detest dressing up in hyper femme drag. This used to be something I adored, but it eventually became a chore I dreaded. In 2015 I began shooting photos of myself late at night after coming home from a performance in which I’d dressed up. Some of these were after attending a live event as LMC, some were after performing a show with my band Glass Traps. At the time I thought that since I’d bothered to glam it up, I should get some more art out of it. But I think I also used the private experience to decompress and process the live performance. Live work is traumatizing...for me at least. And I think most would agree that documentation of live work rarely lives up to the experience of performing it. In fact I’m usually very disappointed with the capture of the work and prefer to recall the way it felt. I think that coming home late at night, exhausted and sucked dry from the live performance, I then got to have this quiet intimate time with myself, my lens and this reflected and refracted drag version of myself. I did this after every performance from 2015 to 2018. It became a solitary ritual of self-love and healing from the self-sacrifice of my psyche prior in the evening. I’ve not done live performance in the past couple of years, but will probably continue making these photographs when and if I resume. The material interest to me here is that the distortions and reflections are happening in real-time with the mylar, a ceiling fan and light from household lamps and video projector blue screen.

Most of these images are available as pigment inkjet prints on cotton rag…inquire within.