Artist's Statement

 

Inclusive Exclusivity started with a story—one story.

 

“A woman who had known me my whole life, who trusted me to teach children, who thought I was smart and kind and good with kids, found it appropriate to ask me to separate from someone who was, as far as she was concerned, just a friend. And suddenly for the first time I knew. I had suspected before that when I did come out I would lose a lot of love and support I had growing up from my church community, but this is the first time I’d known it, and it stung. I’d put so much of my life into participating here and being a part of the community … a community that didn’t want me.”

 

We all have or will experience that kind of loss and alienation.

 

We live in a time when we are known by our distinctions, whether gay or straight, Christian or Muslim, black or white, etc.  It is important that we distinguish ourselves as individuals. But it is also important we recognize that it is our exclusive differences that include us in the whole of society.

 

In Inclusive Exclusivity I share the discrimination experiences and the personalities of the storytellers among us by asking the question, “Who are people behind our distinctions, and how are we related to one another by experience?” The website is intended that we may learn from it that we are all part of one large community, and we are all in need of acceptance when it comes to how different we may be from one another.

 

Using the medium of a website to share storytellers’ experiences allows for individual needs for anonymity and allows for creativity in the way the we experience the narratives. The use of audio, video, and graphics helps us experience the narratives in ways that we all experience life—using our different senses.

 

I do not rely on explanations to share the storytellers’ experiences because it is important that we experience the stories in their own ways—in ways that we can relate to. And by including a storyteller from past history I extend the sense of discrimination and of shared experience through time.

 

The ultimate drive of Inclusive Exclusivity is so that we may all experience a fellow-feeling in our shared differences.