Kimberly Wilder: An Assessment

e., shemales), leading them away on a leash, baseball bat in hand, to be beaten; or escorting a neo-Nazi female commandant past a file of bent-over schoolgirls who exhibit their bare, branded buttocks--and their cocks and balls--to the visiting dignitary.

In other drawings with religious themes, the characters are associated with less specific a religious creed. In these sketches, sex occurs between an angel and a female devil or a transsexual demon or between a human t-girl and a female demon. In one case, a demon fucks herself with her cock or tail (it is unclear which).

In many of her drawings, the artist's central character--almost always Kimberly herself, or a version of herself--has a secret (a penis) which is revealed, much to the protagonist's mortification. Kimberly's art is an endless coming out, the repeated revelation of her transgender status an artistic confession of sorts by which she seems to seek not so much reconciliation as acceptance (or, maybe, self-acceptance), validation, love, and the freedom that comes with such tolerance, with such affection, and with such esteem. It is often a frustrated hope, though, for her art is full of pain, of suffering, and of misery, of both a physical, a sexual, and an emotional nature. It is the pain of a martyr who wants relief and release, but who also has come to enjoy and to need the domination and the control of others and the punishment and the derision that they heap upon her, despite--or maybe because of--her beauty, her talent, and her personal hopes and fears. (In a cruel world, beauty may be more a liability, at times, than an asset.)

In seeking rest for her tortured soul, Kimberly takes many forms. She is a schoolgirl, a best friend, a cross dresser, a transsexual; she adopts the persona of the maid, the waitress, the waif. She becomes an angel, a demon, a servant, a religious devotee, a captive of Amazon warriors. She plays the part of the merciless dominatrix, the cock sucker, the ass-fucked bottom, the streetwalker, the bride.