JORGE
ARIEL
ESCOBAR

Ode to My Thirteen-Year-Old Self (2021) is an installation consisting of a standalone video piece and two CMYK serigraphs from F**k the Ones I Envy. Both of these collections explore the feelings I had as a young closeted teenager who felt shame for knowing I was gay but tried very hard to repress it.

The two serigraphs, The Boy I Want (...to be) [left of video] and Thinking of You [right of video], speak to my idealization of the all-American by next door aesthetic that was plastered all over the visual media I was viewing growing up. As an latinx, immigrant I knew I could never achieve this appearance but still tried everything I could to achieve it so I could eventually be wanted by someone that looked like that.

The center video piece is titled, The Red Power Ranger Made Me Gay. After finding a clip from the children's television series, Power Rangers, that features the Red Power Ranger ripping his shirt off for essentially no reason. I took this clip and ran with it using it as the "origin" of my queerness. Through the use of repetition of the clip I inter-spliced homoerotic images into the work as the images bounced back and forth with moments of black where a voice can be heard scolding the viewer to "stop what they're doing or else."

I felt both of these works fit well together which led me to creating this installation as one cohesive piece. For the video work I painted a section of the wall pink and added the repetitive text, "I was called a fag once in class and immediately turned pink." The repetition and the act of writing out this text mimics the grade school punishment of writing something over and over again on the chalkboard.