Mother Comes to Venus

Zackary Drucker is a Los Angeles-based independent artist, cultural producer, activist, and filmmaker. Drucker utilizes photography, performance, and video to break downs pre-conceived notions of gender, sexuality, and identity. Drucker’s work explores potentialities for queer and trans futures, utilizing both narrative and non-linear storytelling to imagine new modalities of queer and trans representation. Drucker uses her experiences as a trans woman and those of her collaborators to showcase nuanced and varied accounts of trans existence. Drucker’s photography often accompanies her film practice, functioning as a figurative nexus of her performance and video work. Her photographic practice includes highly personal portraits that explore themes of voyeurism, intimacy, and personal history.

Drucker often collaborates with trans matriarchs to explore models of queer motherhood. Her film Mother Comes to Venus, 2018, portrays a fictionalized post-gender Hollywood, envisioning a world where queer and trans people control their own narratives. Powerhouse agent, Venus Allen, grapples with her newfound power and responsibility towards representation and is visited by her spiritual “mother” for guidance. Drucker’s film Unison, 2013-2017, explores multi-generational queer identity. The film’s cast includes the late Mother Flawless Sabrina, a drag queen and queer activist, as well as Drucker’s real-life mother, and Van Barnes, a trans woman and frequent collaborator with Drucker. Dreamlike non-linear sequences of these figures evoke a visual depiction of trans and queer identity over the course of a lifetime.