Writer Maxi Wallenhorst describes how “[t]he figure of the trans woman supposedly  encapsulates a kind of dissociated knowledge that is knowledge not for her but for other people.” If reductive allegories must be the inheritance of trans women artists, then the allegorical gesture can be refashioned to our own ends. My recent works depict women in invented allegorical scenes. One figure chisels at a fossil between her legs; another figure keeps a fountain circulating with the help of her friends. Even as I reveal these women, I am unsure whether their image belongs to me, but paint is the means through which I assert knowledge that is mine, an expertise in and of my body. If her image is for other people, it is nonetheless made of my time and choreography. I am so reluctant to confess my pessimism when paint is so lovely to touch. These figures’ contortions and constricted movements feel vulnerable to me so I use the only tools I have to steal their time back from you, the viewer. An aggressive and dynamic formal vocabulary takes sensory primacy over the image.  Accumulation and subtraction. Clumsy metaphors work hard but my body works harder and is clumsier.