The Ohio Artist Registry (OAR) is an exciting opportunity for artists to share their work, connect with the creative community, and establish an online presence—all on a free, virtual platform! The OAR encourages artists working in all art forms, throughout Ohio and beyond, to create a profile, which allows them to better promote themselves and their work. Being listed in the OAR provides artists with new opportunities to share their work with clients, galleries, patrons, and audiences. A listing in the OAR does not confer an endorsement, approval, or verification by the Ohio Arts Council.
For more information, contact Kathy Signorino, artist programs director, at kathy.signorino@oac.ohio.gov or 614-728-6140.
Zelda Thayer-Hansen
Cleveland Heights Ohio 44121 United States
Bio
Zelda Thayer-Hansen is a Cleveland-born interdisciplinary artist working at the intersections of textile, illustration, sculpture, performance art, and collaborative research. Their works document the complexities of fleeting, repetitive human interaction, trans-embodied difficulties with binary systems in society, and discrepancies between habitual and innate senses of self.
Artist Statement
My practice explores and challenges the performative aspects of everyday interactions, highlighting the physical and psychosocial exchanges between the body and its environment. Through gestural drawing, garment making, participatory interaction, and live immersive performance, I explore how these encounters leave traces—both tangible and intangible. These garments, objects, and fragments of their surroundings then serve as artifacts, bearing the marks of social interactions that shape the queer, ever-changing self. I reflect on how performance artifacts—once removed from their original environment—still provide contextual evidence of what happened throughout a time-based piece. By employing repetitive movement and note-taking, I strive to vulnerably capture the presence of queer bodies in space and how they are perceived. My work is an ongoing investigation of how external stimuli and social exchange imprint themselves on the queer body, blurring the boundaries between what is performed and what is innate.