A visual artist (he/she/they)
Traditional and digital painting, crochet and crafts, drawing and more.
Expressing my loudest experiences as a queer, disabled artist to be heard through honest representation and visual metaphor.
Myth standing next to their painting, “What’s Not Sticking?” The painting was on display in the University of Montana’s Fine Art building entrance.
<aside> đź’¬ Myth Deck is an undergraduate Art student at the University of Montana in Missoula.
Pursuing a variety of forms of art since a young age Myth has discovered painting to be an area of major interest and breakthrough for them through their studies and education. Myth had work featured in two local Juried Shows and Frame of Mind's Queer Under the Big Sky art exhibition for artistic depictions of their community's struggles as a queer young adult. Complicated, abstract, and stigmatized subjects such as these appear often in Myth's work as a painting student.
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"Disorder is disadvantage," is said sincerely to my face.
Emotion is embarrassment and queer is quenchable according to misguided morals in tidy boxes gift-wrapped by scripts. Beliefs are building borders, ideas are imaginary, and standards are merely simulated by those who misinterpret anything but what is concrete in the physical and visual. Paint is permanence, craft is credible, and artistry is honest in ways that my strongest identities are not often allowed to be, risking misconception.
Words are messy and so is art, but the difference that I can decipher between the two is the amount of tolerance granted in reply to two very different attempts of organizing the disorderly. My paintings rely on packaging my quietest yet most insistent words into a digestible and mortally seen format. As a disabled, neurodivergent, queer young adult, I must recognize self care in the form of communication as a necessity.
Through words alone, it is not achievable for myself or others in similar spaces to be explicit in their needs. Painting is my form of outspoken and irrefusable advocacy. Like others battling similarly before and after me, I must acknowledge that nurturing oneself in the way of artistic communications must contain the trials contained in life's lockbox without declining the mutually present pleasures.
I refuse to depict anything but the coexistence of bitterness and beauty in my work that my words would not quite unlock. "Queer" makes a colorful palette. "Emotion" drives vivid strokes and stark values.
"Disorder is disadvantage," is said sincerely to my face.
"Disorder is my richest advantage," is what my work states sincerely back.