Roadkillers is primarily inspired by my experience living in small-town rural Iowa as a Los Angeles native. In the city, I am almost never around dead animals, and during my first year of undergrad schooling at Cornell College--located in Mount Vernon, Iowa--I found myself repeatedly shocked and revulsed by the sheer amount of roadkill I saw on the highways surrounding my sleepy college town. What stood out to me the most was how normal and pedestrian this was to many of my peers who, unlike me, grew up in the midwest. Parallel to this, I noticed a similar discomfort in myself as I gauged the political temperature of some of the community surrounding campus and rural Iowa in general. My gender presentation is something I think about nearly constantly, especially in politically conservative environments. Within the mostly progressive bubble that Cornell College provided, I was still usually the only woman with visible body hair in the classroom, another reminder of the stark cultural difference between my home on campus and my home in metropolitan California. My personal style allows me the option to signal my identity, personality, and ideological beliefs to others if I so choose, which can be equally scary and exhilarating, depending on the context. Clothing as a component of this signaling process has been a central passion of mine ever since I could dress myself. 

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      As a fashion collection, Roadkillers is a culmination of my thoughts and emotions around queer femme midwest culture shock. In many ways, I feel a sense of identification with the corpses I see on the side of the road, and thus felt pulled to photograph them up close. Because of who we are, and our lesser humanity in the eyes of broader society, our safety is routinely disregarded. The garments I present here use visual motifs associated with the gore of car-mangled carcasses to reframe these images as a kind of armor, or metaphysical protection, for myself and other women or queer people in my community. Even when our reality may be scary or painful, clothing can be a transformative tool to still practice resistance and liberating self actualization.