improvising sight lines

This body of images and the thesis paper describe a type of world-making, which hinges on this possibility to see beyond reality into the world of the fantastic. A movement between methods of creation: “straight photography”, collaging and mimicking straight photography through intervention and staging, has become especially important to my work. This movement outlines a queer knowing that challenges the notional universality and singularity of heteronormative methods of knowing. Queerness produces an interrogation of the heteronormative matrix, and suggests a movement towards a new knowing that pushes against and between a humanist logic and a structuralist one. The former assumes that the self is a discrete, knowable, and controllable thing. The latter suggests that the self is incoherent and dependent on a series of symbolic coordinates that are structurally unstable. The process and the tension in moving through the spectrum this dichotomy creates, reveals that the self is neither whole nor empty, it is caught in suspension, creating a web of paradox and possibility. Improvisational sight lines, which are attuned to self-shattering, illegible subject-hood and possibility, have become the foundational circumstances of my queerness.