Transcript for the audio of Mx Justin Vivian Bond sharing the inspiration behind her wallpaper design and the value of being “authentically myself”
USA, 2024
Audio time: 2 minutes and 30 seconds
Hi, this is Justin Vivian Bond. I'm a singer songwriter, cabaret chanteuse, and multi-genre artist.
This wallpaper is from a show I did called My Model/ My Self. It was originally a triptych of three different wallpapers, one which is the one you see with my self-portrait on it. Another was of the model Karen Graham, and the third was a wallpaper with both of our faces on it. As a trans person, I was constantly looking at what I thought was an idealized version of femininity. And for me, Karen Graham represented that.
The wallpaper design was inspired by several things. Billy Baldwin, the 20th century American designer who was a queer from Baltimore, designed a wallpaper based on a drawing by Matisse, called l’Arbre de Matisse. I also decided to use laurel leaves because I was inspired by a song called Take This Longing by Leonard Cohen. I thought that song encapsulated true longing, and being a young queer kid, longing to be able to express my gender in an authentic way and to be surrounded by beauty created by other queer people.
We all have our inspirations, which is where we develop our own language. And sometimes it starts out where you copy somebody, which it did for me, but what I ultimately realized was that the thing that I admired most about the people I admired was that they were unique and unlike anybody else. So, I realized that in order to be like the people I admired, I actually needed to become as authentically myself as I could possibly be. And so if you want to be an original artist, you really just need to know yourself and express yourself because there's nobody that can be you but you.
