Jay Michelle Elizondo: Paper Doll

In 2025-2026 A.I.R. Fellow Jay Michelle Elizondo’s inaugural solo show, Paper Doll, the artist invites viewers into an intimate, unfiltered world where she confronts complexities around nostalgia, home, family, and childhood trauma. Paper Doll is a multimedia exhibition comprising two bodies of work: Paper Dolls (2026), and I’m A Girl (2023), creating a dialogue between imagined and lived personal histories respectively.

Paper Dolls is a series of six, nine-inch digital hand-drawn paper doll cut-outs depicting Elizondo as the little girl she was but never got to be. The dolls inhabit an accordion-style book which unfolds to reveal three-dimensional paper domestic environments, complete with paper cut-out furniture and accessories. The environments, reproduced from archival photographs of the artist's childhood, anchor the scenes in reality. The illustrated paper dolls, however, originate in the artist's imagination, in a stark contrast with their backgrounds.

Reclaiming the visual language of her youth, Elizondo situates each doll in the Y2K aesthetic and hyper-feminine clothing she longed for in childhood. Each doll embodies a different aspect of girlhood Elizondo would have experienced: dressing up as Dorothy from The Wizard of Oz on Halloween, dressing up in her grandmother's clothes, and donning her ballet leotard and tutu. She renders each doll in painstaking detail—an act of intentional re-imagining and care for the trans youth of her past.

Elizondo models her own femininity from the examples of those around her—aspirational facsimiles of her mother, grandmother, and sister, as well as women in pop culture and media inform the artist’s self-construction. A deployment of these iconographies is a deployment of the self. In doing so Elizondo escapes into a feminine fantasy as an act of survival, sheltering from the fear and shame she felt as a trans adolescent.

While traditional paper dolls invite users to manipulate the doll, Elizondo's dolls are fully realized ephemera meant to be viewed, but not altered. By denying viewers the accustomed act of altering the dolls, she further enacts agency over her childhood self.

Projected nearby is I’m A Girl, a five-minute home video archive featuring a four-year-old Elizondo in her grandmother’s garden. Subtitles added to the archival footage emphasize the seemingly mundane words spoken throughout the video. A jarring, abrupt bleep redacts the utterances of the artist’s “deadname.” Elizondo creates a tension that is heightened in moments such as when she innocently proclaims, “I’m a girl,” and is mocked by her family.

Home videos and archival footage are the ultimate vessels of nostalgia, offering a warm, comforting window into the past, but Elizondo’s interventions disrupt this comfort, creating an environment in which viewers are constantly encountering boundaries. As with Paper Dolls, the tension between what the artist reveals and withholds plays a nuanced, vital role. Visibility is important, but so is self-preservation.

In the current political climate, trans youth is marked by fearmongering, propaganda, legislative bans on healthcare, bathroom laws, sports bans, restricted school environments, and forced outing policies—all attempts to control and regulate trans children. While the viewer is invited into Elizondo’s space to witness her history, they are not entitled to consume every part of it, mirroring the constant tension between her strained nostalgia for home and her desire to amend it.

Paper Doll is both therapeutic and celebratory. A sort of untouchable nostalgia where tenderly, almost pathetically, Elizondo attempts to re–imagine a fantasy girlhood for herself—but like the dolls, her past is fixed. In healing the little girl she never got to be, she ultimately heals the woman she has become.

Jay Michelle Elizondo lives and works in New York. Elizondo is an artist whose use of video, photography, drawing, and painting seduces viewers into intimate confrontations with her trans body. She received an MFA from School of Visual Arts in 2020 and a BFA from Columbus College of Art & Design in 2018. Her work has been featured in exhibitions at Project For Empty Space at Times Square in New York, SPRING/BREAK Art Show in New York, NY, Smack Mellon in Brooklyn, NY, and Satellite Art Fair in Miami, FL. She has presented curatorial projects at SoMad in New York, NY, and at SVA Chelsea Gallery in New York, NY. She is a 2025-2026 fellow at A.I.R. Gallery and was a 2020 resident artist at The Chautauqua School of Art Residency in Chautauqua, NY. Elizondo’s work was featured in Smack Mellon’s 2022 Hot Picks, following her feature the year before. She is a recipient of The 2020 Edward Zutrau Memorial Award, The Jeff F Hilson Memorial Fund, and The Edith Smilack Fund. Her work has been published in Hyperallergic, The Brooklyn Rail, and Front Runner Magazine.