A few weeks ago I had been thinking about how specificity is the door for The Latest and potentially all art. We can use art to share our stories from where we are standing and that someone else can stand somewhere entirely different and still recognize something through the work. And that’s exactly what has happened in a big way. Someone standing in Johannesburg, South Africa, in another country, on another continent, looked at The Latest and found something to connect to.
That is one of the things I've always loved about art. And The Latest is finding its way into spaces, that when I first created the images, I wasn't certain would have room for it. This time its Through The Lens Collective in Johannesburg, South Africa.
“Through the Lens Collective is a collaborative educational and developmental photographic space created by South African visual artist and educator Michelle Loukidis” and the show, that 15 images from The Latest is honored to be a part of, is called Illusions of Autonomy.
Illusions of Autonomy
October 21st, 2026
Through The Lens Collective describes Illusions of Autonomy “Contemporary society frequently celebrates the independence, leadership, and empowerment of modern women. However, this narrative of linear progress often masks a more complex reality. Beneath the surface of social advancement lies a sharp contradiction: the promise of absolute freedom alongside the systemic rollback of rights, the heavy burden of modern expectations, and the ongoing policing of women’s bodies.
Illusions of Autonomy seeks to interrogate this paradox. The exhibition explores the schism between public promises of liberty and the actual restrictions that dictate daily life. We invite lens-based artists to submit provocative, critically engaged photographic work that looks past superficial narratives of liberation to reveal the real fractures in contemporary women's autonomy.”
I was particularly drawn to this theme because as a woman and a late diagnosed autistic, there’s this idea that you can follow your dreams, be independent, but only as long as your dreams are traditional and your independence is defined by society. Being an autistic woman adds another layer with the modern promise of absolute freedom that often camouflages a more complex, restrictive reality of masking and social conditioning. Masking or rather unmasking is something I heard about a lot when I started engaging with the autistic community back in 2021. I had no idea an autistic community on social media existed, but when I found it, whoa. I was blown away that there were so many other women like me, when I knew exactly zero autistic women in real life. Representation matters so much. Hearing them talk about unmasking, no longer hiding their autistic traits and being their real self was interesting to me, but after 40 years what did that even mean? I wondered if some parts of masking had just become part of who I am and I also felt like it wasn’t safe for me to not hide my autistic traits in the very red, rural county I lived in.
So I started thinking about masking in another way. I had been masking in a lot of different ways, ways I didn’t even understand as masking, like masking my creativity. I didn’t let myself go fully into photography projects like I had longed to, for fear of being seen as wrong in yet another way- too much, too weird, too colorful, too polished, too much information, too eager, too many ideas, doing too much, taking an idea too far, exploring one concept too deeply, being too repetitive. So I stopped masking my creativity and that’s when TONES happened in 2020.
I went so far and so deeply into color and it was amazing. To hyper focus on one of my favorite subjects was magic. I created a project exploring color, deeply for 6 months. I created 49 photos and 21 stop motions exploring color in daily life and then I got to live the project, spending one day as each color. I ate purple food, listened to purple music, wore people clothes, watched a purple movie, looked at purple art and even did chakra yoga that is purple for the Crown chakra and then I explored the other 6 colors.
All the while I had started thinking about The Latest. I wasn’t ready to make the images, I wasn’t prepared to explore what I knew was in The Latest, but I was thinking about it, imagining and sketching images and gathering props. One day about 5 years later I started working on The Latest and when I did, it poured out of me and it has been such an emotional and powerful time in my life. Diagnosis forces you to look at your life and start to process it, but for me art allowed me to work through things I had only begun to scratch the surface of.
Over the years I have read many books by late diagnosed autistic women and I treasure those books and that they shared their experiences. For years I wanted to see an art series exploring late diagnosis, so I created The Latest for myself and for all the other auties that are also looking for this too.
And to have The Latest enter a show a continent and hemisphere away, on the other end of the planet from Minnesota makes me feel so proud and honored that more women will be able to find this project and connect to the work as well.
So this October 21st, please visit Through The Lens Collective and explore all of the other ways the other 14 brilliant artists have connected their work to illusions of autonomy: Abeer Aref, Jess Levey, Inge Prins, Annemarie Deckers, Angela Crosti, Marie Le Moigne, Teodora Rotaru, Rachel Jump, Ruby van den Brink, Sam Yesko, Stefanie Langenhoven, Stephanie Schwiederek, and Kimshay Philander.