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Tuesday, 09 September 2008 11:11
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 Doubly Triggered
By Jacob Anderson-Minshall
Visual artist Georgette Freeman titles her current exhibit, Up From the Depths: Triggered. When I reach the sixty-one-year-old artist by phone in the same 275-square-foot San Francisco apartment she’s resided in for 33 years; she suggests, “We both know the word triggered. Mine was retirement. What was your trigger?”
When Freeman talks about things surfacing and about awareness—and actions—being triggered by significant life events, she’s speaking not only about her transgender identity but also her creative spark.
 The technique dates to the 1830s, long before Freeman’s photography career began in 1968, when she joined the staff of the Sacramento State Hornet as a photojournalist. Three years later she was drafted into the army as a still photographer. After her service, Freeman went on to study at the San Francisco Academy of Art.
Ready to transition in the early 1980s, Freeman forced her gender-identity and creative spirit back into the closet when she took a position at the U.S. Securities and Exchange Commission.
“I realized that if I didn’t focus, I could conceivably starve,” she explains. “[So], I made the decision to not only go in the closet in 1983 as a transsexual, [but] also…as an artist. I thought I was really going to transition in 1982. I told my parents. I came out to everybody—even at work. And then I had to live that down. It marked my career. I stuck it out [but] it wasn’t pleasant.”
Buried deep inside, her artistic leanings lay dormant for ten years before they bubbled to the surface in the form of stereo cards, a medium that became “a major aspect of my life between ‘95 and 2001, which neatly encapsulates an awakening—hence the title, Triggered. What you’re seeing was what was on the mind of a guy who always had been a transsexual. On the front of one of those cards is my answer to the question ‘When did you first know?’”
Although her gender identity oozed out in photography and writing, it took almost another decade before it could really break loose. Then, in 2001, Freeman transitioned on the job and retired from the Securities and Exchange Commission a few years later.
“I don’t want to say that I’m passable,” ruminates Freeman, who now identifies as a bi woman. “I’m not passable, but I am passable, you know what I mean? If it’s in the bubble where the gender police live and speak those romance languages…I’m going to stand out like a sore thumb. If you put me up in make-up…I call attention to myself. I mean, I look like somebody who just got the prescription for estrogen and they’re like licensed to walk around in high heels and a lounge suit.”
Still she contends, “I don’t go anywhere without being out. It’s my feeling is that if you’re going to spend any length time with me I’m going to have to let my hair down.” Fortunately, she says, “In the Bay Area, there’s three genders; there’s other; and everyone’s an other unless you’re ǘber femme or ǘber mench.”
 Freeman (gcfreeman.com) was first introduced to stereo—and then book arts—by San Francisco Bay Area artistic couple David Lee and Deborah Kogan, of whose intervention she declares, “The universe dealt me one hell of a card there. I sort of just followed my whimsy as I go.”
At the San Francisco Center for the Book, Freeman now teaches classes in creating stereo cards and book bindings like French tablets and French tablet toolboxes.
Happy that her stereo photographs didn’t “have to be” commercial, Freeman directs her artwork at private institutions, rather than mass audiences. “I don’t really want to spend my life doing a thousand of anything,” she claims. But on the flipside, Freeman accepts, “No one, including me, is ever going to get rich on stereo. Just getting the imagery to people, you’ve got to give them the glasses.” And, she admits, nearly 50 percent of Americans can’t even see in stereo. Still, Freeman insists all viewers can enjoy her work “for the subject matter itself.”
In fact, Freeman sets her cards apart by providing additional context for the images, adding text to the card’s backside, where she writes short pieces about her transition and other aspects of her life.
Nonetheless, she acknowledges, “They’re not the kinds of things that I personally would have the patience to sit down and read one to the other. I’d wonder what kind of person this was.”
After creating unique and elaborate boxes in which to store some of her stereo cards Freeman discovered those skills could be utilized in another art form. “What I’ve learned is that I can go into a different market; I can go into book art.”
But becoming a book artist has meant breaking into a tight knit circle of female artists.
“I’m not exactly part of the group, if you know what I mean,” Freeman argues. “It’s not womyn-born [exclusive], but it’s close. They all went to the girls school together; and I obviously didn’t.”
Now, with over five years experience in the book arts field, Freeman has reached a level of successes and become reasonably well known. “I’m a working pro,” she says. “And they sense it.” A recent collaboration with calligrapher Sherrie Lovler—four books exhibiting a binding unique to Freeman—is profiled in the latest edition of the book art journal Bound & Lettered.
But it’s the stereo cards that populate Up From the Depths: Triggered, an exhibit of 28 panels from her collection which opens this week at Portland, Oregon’s 3-D Center of Art and Photography (3dcenter.us), where it will be displayed through November 2nd.
Freeman donated the entire printing to the 3-D Center, which will provide viewers a lorgnette—which she describes as “glasses on a stick,”—thorough which to view the artwork.
Tune in to Portland, Oregon’s 90.7 fm KBOO radio, Tuesday September 16th 6-7:00 pm PST (9-10 EST) when trans writer Jacob Anderson-Minshall (
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) co-hosts the second episode of Gender Blender, a new show on gender streaming live at KBOO.fm.
© 2008 Jacob Anderson-Minshall
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