AJ Strout, Artist + Educator

Being a queer / trans / alt individual who is also an educator, video producer, artist, and writer, my identity is as entangled as my practice is. My work is founded on radical acts of pleasure, queer space making, and community building that interrogates and resists the dominant culture’s tendency to exclude queer folk from spaces that are both real and imagined.  

 

Combining my talents, I design and build (other)worlds in experimental + speculative + futuristic visions. These projects explore what the queer / alternative / trans / experience will look like as the world becomes a more queer place. With the support of Ex Corpse Art Collective, which I founded in 2018, I produce experimental entertainment at themed festivals and community drag shows, placing queer people into narratives and spaces that they are otherwise often absent from. For example, I host a drag show titled Nonbinary at a Cyberpunk Live Action Roleplaying festival every spring in California City. This show is an act of queer space making that thrusts queer people into narratives of futurity. I also produce queer music videos that navigate queer surrealism for underground queer music artists. Most notably, I wrote, directed, and produced a music video for a band called “Male Tears,” which is led by a queer singer. The video, which became very popular in the underground darkwave scene, explores notions of queer exclusion and taking up space. 

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As a culturally responsive educator, my workshops and lesson plans explore themes, topics, and artists that depart from the canons, providing students with the tools needed to write and design culturally informed and innovative artwork in literature and video that is also often queer. I design courses in image and text, worldbuilding, and experimental video production which explore movements in art practice that privilege non white and queer philosophers and art makers. 

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Taking influence from authors such as Judith Butler, Rosi Braidotti, Jose Esteban Munoz, Octavia Butler, and George Bataille, my writing, art making, and teaching explores identity politics, transcendence, and the implications of technology on the social imaginary. In everything I do, I aim to disrupt the masculine, white hegemony, uplift and revive countercultures that have been co-opted by the dominant culture in late stage capitalism by contributing to dialogues in queer, feminist, and non white critical theory. As for my performance and video art, I take influence from artists like Castles Heat to produce works that transform the body.