Charlie Hodes (b. 1998) is a contemporary transmasculine and non-binary artist whose work addresses the psychological transgender experience through painting, ceramics, and mixed-media practices. Trans expression in their work is drawn from working with young children: the saturated color and cartoonish forms in Hodes’ paintings represent the soreness and openness that childhood possesses, where the pedagogy of the developing brain retains imaginative worlds within which any and all forms of expression are commonplace. As adults, this world is devastatingly forgotten and abandoned, and those truest parts of ourselves sit dusty and waiting. Hodes’ work serves as a reckoning of transness and wholeness of oneself that lives within this world. Parallel to this runs the harsh reality of transphobia and homophobia, forcing one into a persistent shifting between self-expression and censorship as a preservation of safety. Hodes’ characters embody this push-and-pull, rendering a visual landscape riddled with the realities of risk and fear inherent within the queer and trans experience. Their work allows viewers and participants to engage within a given queer experience as a temporary space in time. 

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