Like many queers of my generation, I relocated from an inland town to coastal cities to find acceptance. I found community in nightclubs and DIY intersectional art and activist spaces. As these coastal cities become more expensive, vulnerable to climate change, and pandemics, my queer artist community has scattered. We’ve been displaced from our centralized neighborhoods and are sprinkled throughout the boroughs. Some leave these cities, but many also return. Sometimes it feels like a wave came and displaced my community and I am left playing with their discarded false eyelashes, wigs, and neon-colored dicks. Other times, we reunite and create together—and it is fantastic. My work reflects both the grief of this displacement and the joyous collaboration.
I work across experimental photography and installation. My process mimics the tide, elements come in, are assembled and then break apart to come together again in new forms. A discarded wig from a collaborative photoshoot will be left in the tide to collect detritus. I then sculpt and make prints from this tangle of hair and flotsam. The queer ecology of the sea is present in my work; I see symbiotic systems of care existing in seaside ecologies as paralleling the mutual aid so critically important for queer communities to thrive.
Materials that signify being a queer femme to me are a constant in my work. They are my safe water markers, beacons to find other femmes during tumultuous times.
I have been working with Riis Beach for almost a decade- a queer and BIPOC beach in NYC that is under threat from climate change and development. The same patriarchy that undervalues femme labor and disavows the legitimacy of queer bodies also created climate change. It is no surprise that threats to queer spaces and coastal ecologies have potent overlap in places like Riis.
In my most recent works I seek to understand the impacts of cumulative stress on queer femme and trans folks and examine how many are growing botanicals as part of their healing journeys.