Joe Swepson

Joe Swepson currently resides on Bundjalung country in Lismore NSW.  Ze, zir and they are Joe’s preferred pronouns as they denote neither male nor female.

Joe Swepson’s practice is based on explorations of the body, identity, and the self.  Focussing on the body as a commodity, a site of familiarity and political struggle, Joe Swepson explores notions of gender as being based on a western system of binary classification.  They actively disrupt and deconstruct power structures to expose and disable their concealed mechanisms.

Joe Swepson uses photography, video, installation, and emerging technologies (augmented reality and virtual reality) to explore the capacity of gender to refuse stable classification.  Through these mediums, ze explores issues of gender politics and deconstructs accepted narratives on gender.  They are principally concerned with the creation of a non-binary lens and the destabilisation of the notion of ‘the self’ as fixed and permanent.  Through their work, Joe Swepson continually raises the question what is the non-binary body, if it is not defined against the binary system of classification?  Ze uses non-binary and transgender bodies to resist classification, showing non-binary and transgender bodies in a diverse range of contexts, resisting stereotypes of beauty, creating counter-fictions that relocate accepted meanings on aesthetics, beauty and identity.