Villainette is interdisciplinary artist Scout Tran. Ey has two Eisner nominations for comics, has performed puppetry at the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, has recieved a Belle Foundation fellowship for music, has been an Artist in Residence at the Exploratorium, has had a sculpture commissioned by the SF Museum of Modern Art, and is the President of the Board of Traction Project. Ey is most widely known for having been a founding member of the genderqueer art group The Degenderettes. Scout holds a BFA in Painting/Drawing from the California College of Arts & Crafts and an MFA in Performance from the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.

Biography

Early Work

In the late 90s, Scout attempted comics a few times, but was rejected by the local publisher. Ey continued to study figurative painting in junior college as a way to deal with eir gender dysphoria through marketable means. After 9-11, dissatisfied in gallery-art's ability to effect change in the world, ey shifted to installations and performance art, on a trajectory that would lead em through music, video art, street performance, and guerrilla installation. This culminated in an attempt to redesign citywide street games to be educational vehicles about classism. After years of failing to design effective "games with teeth," however, ey abandoned that arena in preference of the more practical Occupy Movement. Ey got by as a street portrait artist and an artist's model, and eventually stumbled into teaching academic drawing and design at Expression College for Digital Art.

Puppetry & Music

In Chicago, in pursuit of an MFA to improve eir teaching credentials, Scout sidetracked to apprentice with the Blair Thomas visual theater company, building and performing in many grand projects at such places as the Field Museum, the Museum of Contemporary Art Chicago, and the Pritzker Pavillion. Ey eventually left eir position as Shop Foreman with Blair Thomas to return home to the SF Bay Area and begin eir own performance practice.

2009 saw Scout's first national tour of solo puppetry, and a reformation of eir long-time musical collaborators Corpus Callosum. As Managing Director of Corpus Callosum, ey recorded three albums, directed several tours, and curated a bimonthly music & performance art series, The Uncanny Valley of the Heart's Delight, at Anno Domini Gallery in San Jose. Corpus Callosum were recipients of the Belle Foundation Fellowship in 2009. In 2010 Scout experimented with early crowdfunding platforms to build eir first festival-scale puppet show, "The Museum Proper," with live music by Corpus Callosum and Deathat.

Scout also worked briefly as a puppet builder for Redmoon Theater in Chicago, propsmaster for Ragged Wing Ensemble in Oakland, and as a stiltwalker for Velocity Circus in San Francisco. Ey recieved an Editor's Choice award from Maker Faire staff, was honored as a Artist in Residence at the Tinkering Studio at the Exploratorium, and was included in the book The Art of Tinkering (2014). In 2013 Scout's puppet-inspired cardboard sculptures were commissioned by both the Exploratorium and the SF Museum of Modern Art.

Comics

Scout was the concept illustrator for Caruso's Dream in San Francisco and Preserve24 in Manhattan (both works by Brian Goggin), among other for-hire illustration projects. Consistent work was hard to find during the subprime mortgage recession, so ey endeavored to launch a fully-crowdfunded career starting in 2012, nominally to serially-publish an experimental graphic novel, Failing Sky. Unexpectedly, Failing Sky was nominated for Eisner Awards in both of its first two years of publication, unusual for self-published work. Along with As The Crow Flies by fellow Degenderette Mel Gillman, it was one of the first Eisner nominations representing trans themes. In 2015, Scout launched a weekly comic strip at strip.villainette.com as a more lighthearted vent for experiences living as trans & genderqueer. Since Failing Sky, Scout has been able to survive almost entirely on audience donations, which allowed em to adapt eir career to activist projects during the Trump administration.

Community Organizing

By co-founding the Degenderettes art club in 2014, Scout began to produce regular agit-prop performances, including the collective's first gallery show in 2015, a bathroom-relabelling campaign in 2016, and an ongoing series of genderqueer merit badges that have appeared on VH1 thanks to Sasha Velour. In 2017, the Degenderettes organized a Color Guard using LGBTQ baseball bats for a number of public marches, built a "Queers Never Die" skeleton parade puppet, and were invited to co-lead the 2017 SF Pride Parade where they organized a die-in and spray-painted chalk outlines of their trans bodies for the rest of the parade to walk over. The Degenderettes were honored by the San Francisco Public Library with a retrospective show in 2018, which was then further honored by being grandiosely censored by international request. Scout's "Trans Dykes are Good and Pure" protest shields, which intially only made Breitbart headlines, were later commended by SFMOMA's Open Space and Transgender Studies Quarterly in 2018. After the heat of the SFPL show, the Degenderettes moved their focus to music promotion via Degenderettes Presents. In addition to organizing regular shows for exclusively trans-fronted bands, they have compiled the largest known list of such bands for use by other booking agents, and publish a trans/intersex/genderqueer music calendar for the west coast called the Degenderettes Datebook.

Since 2016 Scout has held weekly visitor hours at eir art studio, "Scout's Artillery," as a place for trans women, people of color, and sex workers to cathartically process their troubles. Cans and bottles can be smashed with slingshots and baseball bats, and there is a lending library of books by transgender authors.

Originally learning Brazilian Jiu Jitsu for personal self-defense, Scout has been helping organize an international network of trans martial artists in the interest of making combat sports accessible to trans people. "Queer Bash #1," the first-ever trans-specific martial arts competition, was held at Four Elements in Oakland in 2018, followed by QB2 & QB3 in 2019. As of 2020 the Oakland trans martial arts crew incorporated into a 501(c)(3) organization, Traction Project, with Scout as President of the Board, and expanded their scope to include trans-specific career training and practical support for trans musicians.

Upcoming

After a fallow period of hiding from the art world to learn motorcycle maintenance and helping to form the first trans-fem motorcycle club, the Registered Non-Ops, Scout has been slowly returning to recording a new album under the name Bog Princess.

In 2020, Scout launched a new comic about a feral goblin trying to survive the horrors of queer internal politics, titled Wet Ochre.