For the past two decades, I’ve cared for printed matter: letters, drugstore prints, torn journal entries, dive bar photobooth scraps, and other fragments of queer ephemera. I’ve carried them with me—from one dresser drawer to another, across Texas, Arkansas, New York, California, and Colorado. Queerness and printed matter have long been entangled; ephemerality and desire are where they meet.
My interdisciplinary studio practice traces the relationship between printed matter and queer memory, liberation, and loss. I investigate how print has served both as a tool in moments of reckoning and emergency, and as a deeply personal, intimate material—something we hold in our hands, pass between friends, and tuck away in boxes and drawers. My current research suggests printed matter as a facilitator, witness, and residue of gay desire.
Working with materials from queer archives—nightclub flyers, Gay Rodeo clippings, and zines like Straight to Hell and RFD—I construct an archive of intimacy and longing. I also maintain a diaristic archive of my own: taping snapshots and poems into notebooks, stashing letters and notes in shoeboxes. These personal and collective fragments—traces, residues, stains—are windows into queer histories.
My research chronicles the period beginning with the expansion of queer liberation movements post-Stonewall, through the AIDS crisis, and the reactionary backlash of queer visibility leading up to 1995, the year of my birth – and the year in which the highest number of AIDS related deaths was reported in the United States. I collect and work with gay photographs specifically from this era because it was a potent period of history where the prospects of liberation were met with utter catastrophe.
I visit and draw from both formal and informal archives, ranging from carefully collected and sorted Queer materials held behind the doors of universities like NYU’s Fales Library and USC’s One Archive to more chance encounters of stumbling on boxes of queer archives in basements of gay bars.
Through this work, I ask: What is remembered and what is left behind? What disappears? In accumulating and rearranging these materials, I’m not reconstructing a complete narrative—I’m merging fragments, seeking something lost or unknowable: lost futures, lost desires, lost dreams. Moments emerge in shadow and in light. Is another past possible?