Artist 9

This is the title page image for the project "Brandon", created by Shu Lea Cheang, in memory of, and in contemplation of Teena Brandon, sometime known as Brandon, who was raped and killed in 1993 for posing as a man.  Through the simple, black and white imagery, the rather short loop grabs at the essence of Brandon's story, biologically a woman, but identifying more closely with the female gender.  Without the context of Brandon's story, the image becomes much more ambiguous, and could be taken for many different things than it was intended to mean originally.  However, to a certain extent this even furthers the whole mystery and ambiguity that is gender.  By making the transformation in the animation so fluid, it seems that Cheang is implying that the divisions between genders are not as formidable as popular culture has had it in the past, and usually still does have it.