Quotes From Participants

“I felt like a superhero. I felt like I should go and fight crime.”

“There is no sense of time. I don’t know what time it is and I don’t really care.”

“This is how I feel on the inside. I’d like to be more nude, feminine, and bold but I censor myself all the time. This space and context gave me permission to be more myself.”

“I allowed myself to objectify myself in a way that complicates my subjectivity. I got to blur the line. I am a subject man painted as an artistic object – as a “weird” non-gendered object.”

“I loved having the people look at you, but the irony is that they are not really looking at you, you are really looking at them.”

“I felt completely safe. Normally, I always want to modify something on my body. But the paint feels like armor, it feels like it covers me.”

“I don’t know what the purpose of this was. In life everyone is trying to figure out a purpose for everything, but in this particular experience there are no expectations of purpose.”

“The beauty I feel hasn’t been covered, but it has accentuated my beauty. Uncovering another layer of beauty.”

“You become more aware of your body without actually caring what it looks like”

“The interesting part is that there was no reason to do it”

“I didn’t know what I looked like so that was a huge weight off my shoulders.”

“It felt restorative – like a baptism, like walking in the ocean, or a mud spring.”