Blake Wright
Rowan Dunn, digital, 2024My next character, Blake Wright, is a young gay trans man, a cryptozoologist, and—secretly—a werewolf. Borrowed and rewritten from an earlier project, Blake became a crucial voice in the Unreality Archive (my piece for the first exhibition for the year), offering a counterpoint to Westmere’s clinical dissections. His work challenges institutional and academic gazes by centering cryptids as compassionate, complex, and queer.
His portrait includes small signals of his identity: pointed ears, visible scars, a guarded expression. Through Blake, I explore the act of reclaiming monstrosity from within—he is not just researching the archive; he is in it.
The Minotaur and Centaur was a digital painting depicting a minotaur gently cradling a baby centaur, whose hooves are still encased in fairy hooves —the soft, feathery capsules that protect a foal’s mother from its hooves during gestation and birth. This detail, often considered unsettling or "gross," was intentionally included as a symbol of the newborn's fragility and dependence. The piece emphasizes tenderness and care, qualities rarely afforded to representations of the Minotaur despite the inherent tragedy of its original myth.
Rowan Dunn, digital, 2024