Spectrum: The Tremendous Horror Show (2025 – )
In The Haunted: A Social History of Ghosts (2007), Brad Steiger writes “a spectrum was ‘a substance without a body, which being hearde or seene, maketh men afrayde.’ In this sense, it equated with ‘apparition.’ Before the mid-nineteenth century spectrum was rarely used in its modern sense to describe the colours of light.” The term spectrum was then first used to describe autism in the 1970s, with Autism Spectrum Disorder first appearing in the Diagnostic and Statistic Manual of Mental Disorders (DSM) in 2013.
Reading about the history of the term spectrum first inspired me to introduce a play on the word into my annual sheet ghost paintings in early 2025. Over the course of the following months, fearmongering about autism heavily entered Trumpist propaganda: Robert F. Kennedy, Jr. made a public appearance during which he stated that autism destroys families and destroys our children, Donald Trump publicly called autism “a tremendous horror show” during a cabinet meeting.
An autistic woman, I was not diagnosed until after I entered adulthood, partially due to low awareness and incorrect assumptions about autism. This series of paintings is my way of working through my frustrations that, just as autism is beginning to be better identified in marginalized groups, the government would try to make us afraid of the diagnosis. In this body of work, I play on the word “spectrum” by combining sheet ghosts and orbs with rainbow color gradients. The use of sheet ghosts specifically also acts as a reference to masking, a process through which autistic people try to act “less autistic” to avoid social ostracization or other discrimination. I collage the ghosts, orbs, and rainbows with the camp exaggerations of vintage horror films and kitschy Halloween decor. These allow me to poke fun at the discriminatory language being used to talk about autism while creating images I find satisying and visually alluring, allowing me something beautiful to dwell on in the midst of so much ugliness.
With this series, I also want to openly acknowledge the space shared by both autistics and the queer community –– not only because we are both being targeted by Trumpist rhetoric but because approximately 40-70% of autistic people identify as LGBTQIA+ and 11% identify as trans, nonbinary, or gender non-conforming. The rainbow is shared by both communities, signifying autism as a spectrum as well as the LGBTQIA+ community. And my references to Old Hollywood and camp aesthetics almost necessitate credit to queer culture; both have a definitive queer history as well as a special place within many queer hearts.
In a world that feels so occupied by hate and death, I hope we can all enjoy some little rainbow ghosts together.