Image from the Holy Wonder Deck by Luin Joy

Luin Joy in conversation with Sophia Stopper

Published: July 1, 2024

SS: Welcome, Luin! It’s wonderful to reconnect with you over this interview. So you’re living in Durham, North Carolina, what brought you to the South of the USA? How did you go about finding Queer community in that region? Do you find you are garnering extra inspiration from the South’s notorious anti-lgbtqia+ views? Or do you find the environment more stifling from when you lived in Chicago?

LJ: Hi Sophia! Thanks so much for creating this opportunity for me to share about my work, it’s always great to chat with you. I have many thoughts on this question but I’ll start by sharing that choosing to move here in 2022 was a leap of faith motivated by my need for healing and recovery- settling my nervous system, renewing my spiritual life, getting sober, establishing stable housing, and reducing financial stress. Things kind of collapsed for me in Chicago at the end of 2021 and I needed a major change. I’ve also had a personal history with North Carolina since 2016, through my involvement with School of the Alternative based in Black Mountain, NC so it felt somewhat familiar. Overall, Durham has been really healing and has brought stability into my life that I couldn’t even imagine while living in Chicago, and before that, New York.

I found trans/queer community here through Durham Queer Sports - I get to play non-competitive soccer every week with like 30-40 queer people and it’s amazing. We just gather in a field and play together, even when it’s 95 degrees and humid as hell. There’s also a Queer Fight Club, but I won’t share details lol. I’ve made some incredible friends here, I feel deeply supported, and I’m able to spend a lot of time connecting in wholesome and gentle ways-  playing music with people, swimming, hiking, going on long walks, sharing meals, etc. Really grounding activities. In my experiences elsewhere, the dominant forms of gathering that are available for trans/queer people are usually centered on grieving, protesting, or getting fucked up. Which makes sense, given the degree of systemic violence we’re collectively witnessing and experiencing. But I credit adrienne maree brown’s work for helping me recognize that movement, play, joy, and rest are also radical and essential for our survival. I still struggle with feeling deserving of that and it’s a practice in resisting a lot of internalized crap. But this place and this moment of my life feel extremely rare and I’m grateful for it.

At the same time, there are a lot of challenges that come with living here. While I’ve spent a cumulative 10 years living in the South since childhood, (South Carolina, Georgia, and North Carolina), I’m not from this region and I don’t feel able to stay here long term for personal, political, and career opportunity reasons. Most of my family is from the rural Northeast and I’ve moved around a lot in my 31 years of life.

I started my medical transition while living in Georgia in 2016, the same year HB2 (the first anti-trans bathroom bill) passed in North Carolina. And while the South may be leading the charge with creative and new ways to hate us, anti-lgbtqia+ legislation has been ramping up across the country for many years now. The rhetoric they’re using is terrifying and has far-reaching consequences in daily life. For one personal example, I was in a car accident last April and chose not to get in the ambulance because I didn’t want the cis male paramedics to examine my body and discover I’m trans, knowing that would not go over well. I find that fear gets under my skin and when there’s so many voices expressing hatred, disgust, outrage, etc. at us, it’s really hard not to internalize that and lose all sense of worth, safety, and self-esteem.

For anyone not up to speed, 604 anti-trans bills have been introduced so far this year, all across the country - this site is a great resource:

https://translegislation.com/

This map from last June is also pretty illuminating:

Source: https://www.erininthemorning.com/p/june-anti-trans-legislative-risk

So honestly, my experience here is a mixed bag of gratitude and grief.  If you haven’t lived in the South or spent much time here, it’s hard to get a complete picture. In the time I’ve lived here, I don’t claim to have a complete picture. There is a huge population of trans and queer people across the South, I think maybe the largest concentration in the US? So this region is home to some of the most radical, QTBIPOC-led organizing work in the country, in context with the South’s legacy of racism, white supremacy, and other intersectional oppressive systems. The work is frontline, essential, and relevant to this entire country. Southerners On New Ground, SPARK, Southern Fried Queer Pride, Trans Empowerment Project, Virginia Anti-Violence Project, and Transgender Education Network of Texas, are just a few examples of orgs doing powerful work throughout the Southeast.

While I’m here, I’m learning how to cherish all that I have, sit with multiple truths, be honest about what isn’t working, accept impermanence, and identify abundance. This place has taught me how to let my guard down and discern when it is safe/not safe to do so. I’m also learning how to accept and ask for help, to trust other people again, and to show up more fully in community. I’ve learned a lot about how to be self-possessed in my practice without the large-scale art world infrastructure I relied on to feel “real” or legitimate in Chicago and New York. It can also feel very isolating to work outside of those structures at a point in my career when I am still getting established, gaining momentum, and in need of resources, plus capitalism is great at making artists feel worthless, invisible, and unnecessary. For me, that gets amplified by what’s happening with all this hateful legislation. This is a powerful and potent place to be making art right now, but I feel a distinct shift in my body, a sense of ease, and creative flow when I’m in places like Atlanta, LA, New Orleans, or Chicago and am surrounded by a greater density of artists and visibly queer people. That energy feels fortifying and tells me what is right for me.

Cards from Luin’s Holy Wonder Deck

I’m currently working on my relationship with being defined and controlled by external validation. Living in this small, semi-rural city in the South at this moment in history has challenged me to identify who and what I am- how I want to belong in the world, as an artist and in my gender/sexuality when my environment doesn’t exactly reflect or validate these identities. It’s been very hard and humbling at times, but also very healing. I’m planning to relocate to LA when the time is right, but this chapter, my loving community in Durham, and the perspective I’ve gained here, have transformed me and I take none of it for granted. 


SS: Let’s talk about your current two-person exhibition with Ann Haley at The Front in New Orleans. This exhibition honors both yours and Ann’s artist grandmothers, including some of their work alongside your own in the show. Please explain the connections both surface-level and deep below the surface that you have with the work of your grandmother, Susan Wagner Carlson (1933-2023).

LJ: This show has been really powerful to cultivate with Ann- they are an extremely talented artist and I feel blessed to share this unique overlap in artist grandma lineage because it’s a rare connection and has otherwise been hard for me to work through or talk about on my own. It was also really moving to see their grandmother’s work and the way that Ann constructed an environment in the show that honors both practices. The show is called “boy howdy; i wonder why” and has been up since June 8th, the closing is July 7th.

Luin Joy, Together 2, 2024

The concept kind of came together naturally through our long-term friendship and witnessing each other grow over 10 years. This show helped me process a lot of grief from the past year since my grandmother’s death in May 2023. Inviting others into the experience reminded me that grief is a necessary, deeply transformative, contagious sensation in all its forms. Grieving also happens unconsciously and everyone experiences it differently. I’ve put a lot of pressure on myself to access grief in ways that are legible or quantifiable, but I try to remember that it’s not something I need to force, it’s just happening. Even periods of active avoidance are part of that and we experience grief about losses of all sizes. This show has helped me spend more conscious time with those difficult emotions. The sonic material especially - listening to my grandma’s voice fill the space and hold me in those memories, has allowed me to soften into living alongside grief.

My grandma and I were very close and could talk for hours about art and general existential questions of being an artist. I love that we are finally showing work together. We had a shared language that felt very abstract and natural. She was in hospice for just a few days and as she entered the final stages of dying, she would reference things that to some, seemed like nonsense or just part of her cognitive decline, but I knew what she was talking about. When she was no longer verbal, my mom found a way to reach her through a simple melody call-and-response of ma, ma, ma. We all sang together and in that way, she knew she was not alone. That experience honestly convinced me beyond all doubts that when it really comes down to it, music is a fundamental part of us; it is of the body, innately spiritual and incredibly powerful.

Luin Joy and Susan Wagner Carlson, Long-distance Collaboration 2, 2023

I was able to support her emotionally and spiritually through her death, alongside my mom, brother, and aunt. In some ways it was traumatic to witness, but I wanted to be there with her and I’m grateful that I had already been sober for 6 months at that point and could really be present for the experience. Call it a gift of sobriety because I was shocked that I actually wanted to be present for that. Every moment of it felt purpose-driven in a way that felt so clear and hard to explain.

Our art practices were always really different but overall, she set an example for what it can look like to have your practice be a life partner. Painting often feels really vulnerable and it challenges me to be honest and release the fear of being misunderstood. That’s a chronically big presence for me. She truly loved to paint and explored a huge range of painting styles and influences, that’s why I chose painting as my focus for this show.

Hockey Player, 1970 by Susan Wagner Carlson with Wrestler, 2024 by Luin Joy

She spent her whole life making things largely outside of any gallery or formal art context and I think while she struggled with that in terms of self-worth and validation, she also made hundreds of extremely honest, exceptional paintings. In particular, I always loved this hockey player series she made in the 70’s- I was a hockey player but it’s also something about the blues she used, her delicate line work, and the gentle masc forms that always captivated me. For this show, I made paintings that communicate with the hockey players via wrestlers and tender masculinity. Mainly I just wanted to make things that felt like me, but included her influence and vision. A spiritual collaboration of sorts.

I also built a sonic sculpture for the show that plays on a loop in the space with our paintings- it’s about 14 minutes long and is compiled from field recordings of our conversations, her piano lessons with me, birds and wind chimes in her yard, and a song I wrote loosely to the tune of Clair de Lune. She loved that song and it always makes me think of her. I also included a poem I wrote about self-compassion, recovery, shame, and grace. It relates to some of the inner and outer demons I was facing in Chicago and while living with her before I moved to NC. I chose to include it because it touches on some deep, necessary releasing, and the transformative kind of love that I felt through her radical acceptance of me. Our relationship was complicated, but full of tremendous care.


Sonic Sculpture - boy howdy; i wonder why (soundscape), 2024

SS: In your statement for the show you recall a poignant conversation you had with your grandmother:

Right before entering hospice, she asked me “how do you tell the difference between living and dying?” While feeding her applesauce I replied, “I think you know more about that than any of us right now”. She chuckled, as if to say, you’re probably right. She then said, “We have to forgive, we have to forgive everyone. Do you forgive me?” I was shocked. I said “Of course, for anything, for everything. Do you forgive me?” She nodded yes.—Luin Joy

This is a very tender moment that holds a lot of inspiration. What do you think about the topic of forgiveness? How does it relate to grief or fear for you, if at all?

LJ: I’m still sorting out what forgiveness means to me. I think forgiveness is a process that unfolds over time and is full of choices beyond a moment of apology. Same goes for when that apology isn’t possible and you’re working through forgiveness without the other person, or you’re trying to forgive yourself. That moment was such a gift, it’s hard to even find the words for it. It was vulnerable for us both and I’m really grateful it happened. I was truly shocked. It helped clear some resentment and pain I had been holding from our complex relationship, as well as her relationship to me as an artist. Since I was a teenager, she projected career resentment onto me that was never really about me, but I was affected regardless.

Before moving to NC, I lived with my grandma for several months and helped my mom take care of her. It was an especially vulnerable, post-traumatic period for me and I showed up for her as best I could, but truthfully, I was in rough shape. I knew she didn’t hold it against me but my default, internal critic / mean-coach-mode makes it hard to be self-compassionate. So that mutual forgiveness moment was a major release, it was deeply spiritual, and I think was also meant to extend beyond me because it was so full of density.

Luin Joy, Altar, 2024

Thinking about this threshold space and the question of “how do you tell the difference between living and dying” - I was with her during a near-death experience a few months before she passed and when she came back from it, she just stared at me so intensely, fully lucid, and delivered everything she witnessed. She basically told me that there is no separation between the worlds of living and dying - these planes exist on top of each other and we are not alone here, nor are we alone there. She described it like the afterlife is an energetic spatial transition and a plane not visible to most humans, most of the time. In her final day or two of life, I could literally see in her eyes how she was no longer really in her body. There were like, some of the mechanics of aliveness, but her soul and essence had already transitioned. I hear people talk about these concepts, but actually being in it with her was something entirely different.

She came back from that experience with a sense of peace and safety. It was hard for her to hold onto that feeling because our regular conditioning and fear pathways are such ingrained programs, but for a few days she was like, wow, I have nothing to fear.

Holy Wonder cards installed throughout The Front for boy howdy; i wonder why

Witnessing that was profound. I now feel a responsibility to hold onto that gift and remember that there is so much I don’t know and am not really meant to - my life, my purpose, my presence on this planet, are so much bigger than me and go way beyond my comprehension and vision of my place in the world. I am not in control and in some ways, that’s a huge relief. I still get really caught up in self-doubt and questioning my worth and deservingness. It’s all motivated by fear and scarcity, and is such a common experience and mind trap. That’s where my practice with faith and surrender comes in. I’m a survivor in many senses of the word. I’m not a traditionally religious person, I wasn’t raised that way either, but I am deeply spiritual and have experienced a lot of miracles, plus a couple freak accidents, that continue to affirm my connection to source, to the universe, to this planet, to our collective energetic body, etc. With every instance of survival, I can choose to see it as a gift of continued life and claim responsibility to push beyond fear and live in my purpose, however that unfolds. 

That’s always been part of how I process difficult experiences and make sense of the world. It works for me and keeps me focused on what I can contribute - owning my gifts, my potential, and all the abundance I experience, rather than being stuck in resentments, losses, disappointments, and habitual self-focus.

SS: Speaking of fear, you performed for The Neighbors 2nd Anniversary Event back in 2022 by singing in front of a crowd for the first time. Can you recall how you felt before and after the performance? It was a tender vision, so vulnerable. The crowd felt this warmth from you.

LJ: That was a major moment! I remember feeling a mix of terror, clarity, calm, gratitude, care, and open surrender. I had been working with my voice for so many years before that, completely in private, usually in the car, and was working through anxiety and shame for how I would be received, whether people would think my voice was “good”, etc. I kept moving through it though because for a while, singing was constantly making me cry. It wasn’t even sad music exactly. It would be like, music that felt really good to sing and I would cry because I was in so much emotional pain and witnessing / hearing myself vocalize made all of that pain really visible. Sometimes it was about feeling in awe of other voices and their unique brilliance and fullness of self that I could experience through their music. Other times I would feel overwhelmed by hearing myself hit every note, and then feel this wave of grief for how afraid I was to show anyone what I can do with my voice. It would also come up as some kind of empathetic force, listening to others voices and singing alongside them, and feeling so moved by how vulnerable it is to sing. 

So that’s a lot of what was going on for me at the time and before deciding I would do that for the event. I thought I might cry during the performance and that would just have to be part of it. I was also really invested in understanding fear as a force and a material. I knew it would be present for me and audible because I was being witnessed for the first time, so it felt important to name that and include fear as a presence and collaborator. Otherwise I felt it would take up unintentional space.

I chose a song I knew really well and after a little while, I was able to settle into the performance and just feel all of it, knowing I was supported and had already decided that this piece was not about sounding perfect or succeeding in a normal music context type of way. It was about sound, feeling, being witnessed, and giving myself permission. I think that’s the beauty and gift I feel in a performance art context- the work can breathe, become something unexpected, and does not have to follow rules.  

SS: So you’ve been writing and recording your own music for the last few years. Can you reflect with us on this growth process? How do you see the change between your first performance and where you are now?

LJ: When I listened back to the 2022 performance, the growth felt really clear to me, so much so that I have to resist the urge to reject or shame my past self because in my mind I’m like, wow my voice has grown a lot, I only want people to hear where I am now.

Perfectionism is such a powerful impulse! Seeing that growth is a good feeling though and perfection is a complete myth. Especially with vocals because it’s literally a part of the body, it will sound different on any given day, and is completely unique to each person.

I’ve spent a lot of time training my voice by singing alone in my car, I have multiple playlists for this purpose and it’s all artists that feel the best to sing with, or whose voices I’m learning from by imitating what they do. It’s a ton of pop music, which I love, and I’m only like 25% embarrassed to say that Justin Bieber has been a consistent anchor for me in this process of vocal training because what he does with his voice is really challenging and dynamic and I’ve grown a lot by practicing with his music. Our voices also changed at around the same time and pace, based on when I started hormones, and that was quite helpful.

I started doing virtual sessions with an incredible vocal coach in January 2022, (their name is Leslie Allison, I highly recommend,) and one of my goals was to step away from learning by imitation and find my own voice. I also wanted to learn how to compose songs and understand how pieces all fit together when people write music. I’ve always been excited about sound and experimental composition, but stepping into a space where I’m actually working with lyrics and melody was entirely new and intimidating. They broke down a lot of those barriers and helped me tremendously.

Leslie is also non-binary and queer, so working with them created an especially supportive container to work on my fear of being heard, fear of taking up space, fear of being unworthy or not capable. Trans voices are absent from most contexts because we live in a cis-dominated world, but in particular, trans voices are seldom heard in mainstream music. Voice is one area that plugs directly into all of these cultural expectations for how voices correlate with / identify a person’s gender. I think hearing trans voices and music is necessary and powerful in shifting these cultural norms. It’s been challenging to access my higher vocal range because I’m still working through my own internalized stuff and shame in regards to sounding “too feminine” or being audibly queer.

In the past year I feel like things have rapidly expanded though. I found my way into a completely new space with my music and writing my own compositions with my voice, my lyrics, using some samples from other artists but in ways that fit with my sound, and leaning further into making beats and sound environments with my huge archive of field recordings. I’ve been working on an album for the past 2 years that’s close to finished and will be ready for release later this year.

I have stuff from 2017 that is finding a home in my work right now and it feels really exciting to witness such a long-term process because I’m seeing how all these little components find their place at exactly the right time. I don’t need to stress about any of them, or question in the moment why I feel pulled to record a rhythmic gas pump, water on a concrete wall in Chicago, an obscure Justin Bieber sample played from my phone in a small watery cave in Ohio, or a conversation with my mom about painting. They find their place eventually.

SS: Tell us about the Holy Wonder Deck. How did you come up with this idea? What was the process like for making the cards? How is one meant to use the deck?

LJ: The Holy Wonder Deck is a very special, tender project I released in late May that also speaks to this idea of projects moving at their own natural pace. I visited a friend in Savannah in 2022 and witnessed my first handmade / altered playing cards. They could work with other decks for tarot or oracle readings and just had all these messages written in sharpie. It felt so liberating to witness. I started making my own version by painting the surface of playing cards and then writing or drawing my own affirmations, questions, instructions, etc. taken from things I had been writing on pieces of paper all over the walls of my studio and bedroom. It always makes for kind of an intense environment, but this way of writing has always been a component of my practice and feels like being wrapped in a shroud of care. It’s usually supportive messages, reminders, research, and revelatory things that help me orient and de-program some of my negative inner dialogue.

After several months, I had this card collection that had grown to 70 or 80 cards and I brought this handmade deck with me to see my grandma in the hospital. She had this powerful reaction that really changed the way I had been thinking about them. The deck was mostly just a personal tool for me at that point, but she resonated deeply with many of the messages so I taped her 6 favorite cards to a piece of paper and hung it near her hospital bed. It really helped her feel less alone during that period and because it was such a sterile, sparse environment, I think the cards, with their well-loved, handmade energy, felt even more powerful. The staff at the nursing facility also really resonated with them and that gave me a window into how this deck could become something that might help a lot of people, across a lot of different settings and circumstances.

The name came from witnessing moments like that and Holy Wonder to me is this feeling of awe- a recognition that we are each unique pieces of this giant web of human connection, we need each other, and art has this power to heal, liberate, and world-build. I pared it down to 54 cards and wrote a short guidebook to support people using it and provide a bit of backstory as well.

It feels incredible to have it in this form now where I can send it out into the world and the work gets to take on many new forms and provide support for others. That’s my ultimate goal with it. It’s a really vulnerable and tender project and I sense that is why it seems to touch people’s hearts.

I’ve poured many hours and resources into it because it feels purpose-driven and I keep having moments with it that feel directly connected to fate or serendipity. I’m just trusting that it will go where it’s needed and resonate with whoever it is meant to serve. I’m also looking into grant and funding options so I can print another edition and send free copies to nursing homes, hospice centers, recovery centers, therapeutic settings, schools, and any other place that would benefit. The first edition is 50 decks and they’re not sold out yet, so for anyone interested, they’re available via my website shop: https://luinjoy.com/holy-wonder-shop- .

SS: To wrap up, do you have any final thoughts? Anything we missed that you would like to share with our audience?

LJ: I just want to say thank you for giving me this time and space to get deep into these questions - it was supportive and illuminating to share with you and I feel honored! I’m grateful to know you and am grateful for The Neighbors <3

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