Often, those who tread off the beaten path are misunderstood or mischaracterized and so we asked folks from the community to reflect and tell us about the times they’ve been misunderstood or mischaracterized.

Christie Rafol

I constantly feel misunderstood and mischaracterized as a creative that has my hands in many different pockets of work. I can’t point to any story in particular, but in a society that tends to value and identify people by their answer to “what do you do for work?” I always end up feeling like I am trapped in a box while simultaneously going through an identity crisis. My day job is as an architect, but I am also a working artist and a community space holder. I am constantly working on new projects that don’t necessarily fit in a single job description. Read more>>

Dominic Mccourt

For me as a person with two jobs or professional identities people seem to be confused by the way the two seemingly so different endeavours go together. On one hand I’m a butcher and operate in the world of food, on the other hand I’m a painter and make money selling my art. In my reality I don’t see there as much of a distinction between the two pursuits, I put the same level of care into butchering a rib of beef as I do into creating a painting, and the total objective of the two is the same; to create a sensory experience that’s stands out above the mundanity of everyday life. Read more>>

Amanda Dia

When I first started taking social media seriously, I was lucky to have friends who understood my journey and shared my passion. Together, we’d get dressed in unique, unconventional outfits, step outside, and take photos that set us apart from the norm. We knew we’d get judgmental looks—sometimes even outright questions like, “What’s your costume?” It was a lot to handle at times. Read more>>

Miriam Vukich

As an artist…I have learned that the ONLY way to fully realize your full potential as a viable artist is to create exactly what is in your heart and mind. In my previous career (celebrity makeup artist) the “creative choices” weren’t always up to me. I was often only a means to an end, not the driving force of my creative abilities. This is precisely why I am rather single minded in perusing making art that gives me joy and that truly is representative of what is inside my soul. I believe I have a specific vision, that I am compelled to create what speaks to me and have faith that there is an audience that is in alignment. All this being said, I go about making my ‘PunkRockPopArt’ very much in a way a songwriter writes a song…. I tell stories of a sort with my art. The colors are bright and poppy to draw you in and on the surface they can just look like fun, colorful works without any substance or meaning. Read more>>

David Hayes

I think there is a genre bias that really doesn’t allow for the tried and true use of metaphor in the modern age. My work tends to learn to the dark and, sometimes, icky, but the social commentary that underlies each of the works is often ignored because of those presentation choices. As a social scientist and a speculative genre practitioner, I recognize that many of our social ills are addressed through extreme fiction (although, lately, much of that has been ‘banned’ in some form or another). For example, dismissing the horror genre as grime and gore without substance is ill-advised and just wrong. I can tell a socially conscious story set in a terrible world filled with monsters and mayhem because those are an allegory for our real-life monsters and mayhem. The bias or dismissiveness effectively destroys messages. That has been disconcerting. Read more>>