Unfinished
How do I interpret history? Nowadays I find archives of images, evidence that people and ideas have existed for far longer than our digital structures would have us think. When thinking about queer histories and myself as a queer person, I have to consider that the things I create, the way I exist with myself and others, and the way I interpret my political autonomy it are all a part of queer history. How do I define queerness? How have I experienced queerness? I created images that explore these questions through a relatively simple yet widely expansive photographic process called cyanotype. The chemistry is painted onto a substrate and utilizes UV rays from the sun in order to create an image. Working with collage, I thought of defining moments of my own history—times when I really understood what it meant to be queer, when I felt the impact of the past on my present and could fully appreciate the moment for all the nuances and efforts laden within it.
I first came across queer art with the imagery of Robert Mapplethorpe, and subsequently witnessed the lasting pain of the AIDS pandemic. Grief survives even as lives are lost; images survive decades of silence and scream all the louder for it. How the artist gives and gives, leaving pieces of themselves in the things they make. I found queerness was defined by loss, by absence. Timeliness: I come into this world after a decimation of my people, one that is not specified nor discussed. My queer existence was born out of a number of tragedies, and yet somehow queerness survived. I then came across Nan Goldin, whose work was full of unbridled existence. Images of people I didn’t know came to define queerness as community, family, and love, even amidst pain and violence. No justification, no apology—these are moments of pure being.
I am insistent on my multitudes. While I can define queerness, I know queerness cannot define me. I contribute to queer history, but what else contributes to my history? I look back to my parents’ histories: the images in their pasts, the memories and unresolved tensions that were passed down to me. The histories of my parents, the narratives that they lived, are an intrinsic part of my life. At this age—when I am at the edge of everything and nothing at all—I find guidance in exploring my parents’ life. I am inheritor of their joy and sadness, of things they never even told me about. I feel it all. An image of them standing in front of the first apartment they lived in together, a spontaneous moment from the night they met; yet another way I understand intimacy, and perhaps the most literal evidence of family. Lastly, as history is something that is never set in stone, I bring imagery from my own life to negotiate the ever changing narratives that define me. Evidence of intimacy, remnants of survival, simple moments of being—I find the images of my life are queer history, but they are also presents and futures. I do not subscribe to linear time; the past, the present, and the future exist hand in hand and dependent on each other.
Cyanotype has a raw aesthetic and involves a tactile process. The movement required in applying the emulsion reminds me that I am always creating history, and that I am always carrying that history in my body. The parts of the image that are exposed meet the parts that are not in a visceral manner—the moment of movement, the violence of being. I am drawn to the different angular shapes, defined by the absence of imagery in some instances and the edge of the emulsion in others. The act of arranging seems analogous to the way I understand queerness: trying out different ways to be, not in the pursuit of finding a perfect fit, but of finding an appealing way to be in which I am content.
The challenge with defining history is that history is always being made. The past is not a static thing; instead moments elude us, then resurface, and transform. These images provide a glimpse into the way I defined my own queer history. Elements are constantly being renegotiated, taking up new meanings and fading into meaningless. Queerness is always in metamorphosis, as am I, and so I choose to leave this history unfinished
