Panoranima / Spitting Image is both a fantastic photo booth for public participation, and an evolving, chimerical tableau documenting ways people represent and recreate their bodies.

Within an installation of sensational, creature-esque portraits of various folks from the Bay Area queer community, public participants are invited to jump in and pose themselves. In doing so, they are immersed in a landscape of large-scale digital prints and drawings – images emphasizing the imagined, the impossible, and the continually shifting and recreated parts of the body. Participants are then photographed in the installation, positioning their bodies to exemplify particular traits or ways they approach the world, or to accentuate parts of their bodies they are most proud of, find most compelling, or focus on the most. The photographs are digitally altered on-site to make a fantastic creature portrait of the participant, then printed for them to take home.

To facilitate creative exchange as art practice, I ask participants to respond to one of these questions:

• What is one physical or biological alteration/enhancement you would like to have of your body and why?
• How do you use your body to create the kind of world you want to live in?
• What animal, plant or imaginary being inspires you, and why?
• What does queer mean to you?

Responses and images will be compiled online and in a booklet.

The first of the series will be included in the QCC's National Queer Arts Festival visual arts show - "Queer it Yourself," at SOMArts, San Francisco, June 2011. This project is an ongoing series of tableaus depicting various communities and groups to compile their living histories.

See images online! www.ardentata.net/dynamic/panoranima.php

Artist Finley Coyl compels fantastic representations of the queer body through the aesthetic of ritual technology. Her work unmoors assumed normality and unravels patterns of becoming grounded in the sensational.

Various projects include being buried alive in a filing cabinet while wearing a wedding gown [performance, Kyra Rice's Entrainment, part of Philip Huang's Home Theater Fest, March 2011]; dressing four men in stained, assless tights and leather spines to perform a shit dance [set and costume design,Tessa Wills' Reception, the Garage SF, March 2011]; and floating down the Mississippi River on a home-made junk raft with over 30 people exploring art, storytelling and sustainability [Miss Rockaway Armada, NYC & Midwest 2006-07].