What do you want people to understand about gender?
Gender is vast and ever changing. It’s beautiful and all expressions should be respected as sacred. Talk to your people (and family) about gender. Ask everyone their pronouns, not just the people you can’t figure out. If you make mistakes, apologize and try again. Explore your own gender expression. There’s no right way to do it. It’s all valid.
When do you feel most like yourself?
I’ve always felt like myself, when I was a tomboy kid, an awkward baby gay, a queer punk mechanic, a sober femme, and now a trans masc dyke twink. It’s all been me. Gender for me feels very fluid. I think that if I can stay open, find joy in the present (even when I’m struggling), and accept that change is inevitable, then I will always feel like me.
Sara Baar is a queer designer, photographer and sometimes stylist originally from a small rural town in the Maritimes. She runs Say Hey Studio, a brand design & photography biz that supports womxn run businesses. Inspired by glam rock, cowboys and COLOR, she’s always looking for good people and good light.
@saramariabaar @sayhey_studio
Note from the Art Director:
Sara’s work carries a certain brand of pop magic. I use “pop” as a descriptor carefully but willingly, in this case. While the word might be tainted, often used to plainly describe the banality of the marketable, I think there is a true brilliance in pop, like the measured use of sugar to create a delectable caramel. Sara’s work is sweet with a glaze of glamour, carefully poured over the stills of the every-day. But unlike most art and imagery we grant the ‘pop’ descriptor, Sara’s work never sits heavy on your palette, nor does it squint your eyes with its glow. It is vibrant, but not saturated. She celebrates her subjects, bouncing their own light back onto them, bathing them in it. Her work takes what is there and amplifies it, displaying it in all of its colourful splendor.
Though she has photographed a myriad of folk for Discorder, her personal practice both as a photographer and designer find her focusing on queer identity, gender play and performance, lifting the veil off of accepted yet dated binaries and turning them inside out.
Though she’s told me sometimes she wishes she was happy wearing beige, it is clear to me that the colours and magic that you can find in her art, she also carries within herself. The pop she invokes is deliberate and precise — like the swagger of a cowboy, the gloss of bright lipstick, and the casual spell of a timely wink.