Tender Scans engages the queer body in relationship to ways in which bodies are imaged, rendered, and shared through digital archives and the digital production of objects. In 3D scanning my our bodies we are allowed me to travel inside and outside of our skin, to see it as a paper lantern lit up from the inside. This uneasy passage through the skin-as-data, the body-as-jpeg, conjures sensations of marginality, transience, ephemerality and fragmentation. A queer body is always contested terrain, existing as an apparition, an implicit challenge to accepted norms. Using available scans of historical icons in combination with her own body scans, Stacy Jo Scott composes 3D printed body fragments in terra cotta.

​

This work also considers other mythic interpretations of the body, especially ancient classical theatre masks. These theatrical masks allow a person to be both seen and unseen. Scott is especially interested in the backsides of the masks, how this surface is stepped into by its wearer. The surface at which their face is pressed against the mask is an interface of transformation and liminal identity. It is like a screen through which the body interfaces with an ideal, an image of the self or alternative self, very much like the screen of a computer user interface in which identities are shifting, constructed, and fleeting.