Reflecting on ideas of transition and metamorphosis, the artist turned toward Carnivale from his home state of Louisiana for this body of work. The Mystic Krewe of Apollo is the oldest, continuously gay Mardi Gras krewe in Louisiana, and he worked from photographs and memorabilia to memorialize his queer ancestors in these paintings.

For the artist, this series embodies ideas of duality, feeling, the grotesque, and the ornamental, which all play out in the Carnivale coming-of-age ritual and its self-made, archetypal characters. Growing up queer and Cajun, it was easy for him to make connections between the accepted vernaculars of each tribe. Cajuns, one could argue, seem to contain a latent queer dimension in the context of American culture, with their dark mythos and history.

Through personal history, memory, queer archives, and folklore, Jacob Todd Broussard's paintings and drawings examine narrative structures and create meaning through disparate imagery. His work investigates painting’s relationship to queer subjectivity by utilizing strategies of ciphers, hiding-in-plain-sight, and calling upon forgotten or marginalized histories. Pulling from the Cajun folklore of his childhood, Broussard’s work engages an archetypal realm that investigates the psychology of imagery, including a large-scale project inspired by the artist Forrest Bess.