On a Queer Gaze
This work in progress is the most personal of my work.
Themes of beauty, fragility, resilience and freedom are explored here through the juxtaposition of portraits with images of nature.
A flight on a jet plane across an ocean to escape a dark storm.
A rock on a gay San Francisco beach, with a hallucinatory mosaic of barnacles and vein-like patterns. A rocky beach in Athens Greece, with the blinding sunlight, the feeling of freedom, gazing at the endless horizon.
A hill facing the Acropolis, a meeting place on hot summer days. The dead agave plant with a hole in the middle where the flower stalk grew in a final moment of glory before death, leaving behind an intense pattern of leaves reminiscent of human hands grasping each other.
Two cedars in an eternal act of love. A childhood photograph, the great blue of the Aegean Sea, taking medicine in front of the mirror. Activism.
The tomb of the poet Frank O'Hara: "Grace to be born and to live as variously as possible"
There are portraits of friends, and also portraits of artists I admire. An exceptional orchid at the Bronx Botanical Garden. It is through this mixture of different types of photographs that a personal story develops. The story of a queer gaze.