Please Return To:

Abstract

In Please Return To: I construct mixed media paintings, sculpture, and textiles that contend with the relationship between queerness and the landscape. I draw from landscapes that have shaped me, using the body and landscape as orientation devices to explore my experience occupying a queer body. Landscapes are not neutral, but rather are shaped by and reveal systems of power. I use queerness as an active and expansive term– in queering the landscape, I’m not only thinking about how landscape painting can be subverted, but also how this process may reveal complications of queer legibility, belonging, and embodiment.

Like an archeological dig, I pull from personal archives and queer theory. Theorist Sara Ahmed explores the body as a sedimented history– both the body and its surroundings are mutually shaped through repetitive action over time. I use materials such as recycled paper, fiber, and cement as forms of physical poetry to build emotional landscapes. Industrial and natural, soft and rigid, fragmented and solid– the work traverses material boundaries, drawing attention to how we construct naturalness and how these embedded assumptions construct possibilities for how bodies should appear and behave.

Inviting participation, I ask the viewer to co-construct the landscape by tangibly shaping the environment through imaginative play. I engage with cast shadows and camouflage as metaphor for queer legibility, acknowledging both the simultaneous complications of and desires to be seen. Amidst an increasingly contentious political backdrop in which queer and trans people are subject to violence, surveillance, and erasure, the work contends with how grief and concealment can exist alongside play, growth, and possibility.