OMEN/ME

Installation and Statement

Displayed from April 4-11, 2025 in Fisher Gallery, Oberlin OH as a part of a Capstone Studio Art exhibition, “don’t be a stranger”, highlighting work from Kay Patrolia and 5 other peers.

As a part of my series “On Transness and Bathrooms”, the diptych, 4x5 ft oil paintings, OMEN/ME and _omen/Me_ specifically focus on the impact of Ohio House Bill 183, signed into law in November 2024 and put into effect at Oberlin College on February 25, 2025. The law bans transgender students from using bathrooms that do not align with their “assigned sex”, applying to academic institutions from kindergarten through university level.

While this law is awful and restricts the freedoms of all transgender students, there isn’t any part to the law which physically prevents binary trans students (trans men and women) from using the bathroom of their choice. However, it does force institutions to have only men’s and women’s bathrooms and single-use gender neutral bathrooms.

I felt myself and other gender non-conforming Oberlin students particularly impacted by the law as we were now forced to choose a bathroom: men’s or women’s. In this moment of transphobia, I took comfort in the bathrooms of the Oberlin Venturi Arts Building. Since I first started at Oberlin, these bathrooms have been missing vinyl lettering on their doors, instead reading “OMEN” on the women’s room and “ME” on the men’s room.

This unintentional (yet undisturbed) queering of the bathroom spaces was a comfort to me throughout my time at Oberlin, inspiring my arts practice with their subtle intervention: which am I today, an omen or me, as I use the bathroom? The absurdity of it illuminates our absurd reality of gendered bathrooms themselves.

In OMEN/ME, I am resolved to my rejected gender, protesting on a toilet outside the bathroom doors which are closed to me. Hung across from this is _omen/Me_, where I still protest outside the bathrooms on my toilet, but now I do so with the doors flung open to identical, disco floored bathrooms while I pose flipping off the viewer. Because of the identical nature of the bathrooms, you cannot know if the wall behind me extends into the bathrooms and separates them, or if it is just one large, double doored bathroom.

For the gallery showing of these two pieces, I managed to source an unused, free toilet in the area to position between the two works. Viewers were encouraged to sit on the toilet as they contemplated the diptych.