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A triptych that displays from left to right: A person with a wolf pelt, in the middle panel A man and a woman engaging in sex, and there is a mirror behind them with a wolf as the man’s reflection. In the final panel are two women. A woman is standing holding the face of her partner who is sitting on the ground looking up at her.

And They Were Wolves

Lynn Hayes

Undergraduate
This work began with a dream in the hot summer nights of July. I saw flashes of red, black, and white flash through my mind as men turned into wolves and non-men became owls and woke up with a story of the beginning of the world. Drawing inspiration from Medieval Triptychs and the Renaissance's Sandro Botticelli, I tell the story of how queer and femme people experience love under the grips of a patriarchal society. Cisgender and heterosexual men are often the precursors of violence against women and the LGBT+ community. Their transgressions bleed into how queer and femme people engage with love and sex. This triptych introduces the themes of transformation with wolf motifs to depict the duality of transness and hypermasculinity, of male performance, not for their partner but for an imaginary audience he has created. Eye contact represents connection and separation, and then queer love that is not centered around a man but the intimate space created within queer and femme relationships. Meant to evoke the feelings of reading a storybook the vibrant colors work with the figures to tell the story of what love under the patriarchy manifests.

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