Changing Landscapes

I did not expect to be showing these two bodies of work together outside my own studio.

The works of love full of life, completed in 2006, are little altars to queer love. In the midst of dangerous and oppressive times, with the world threatening to explode with hatred and violence, I fought back with the joy, innocence, and carnality of romantic love. Filled with color and sensuousness of surface as well as faith in the importance of the spontaneous gesture, these intimate paintings are filtered through a particular genderqueer sensibility and do not apologize for the love of beauty and the intricate indulgences of romance.

The same faith in the authentic gesture and an economy of figure carried through immediately following love full of life into my work on The Plan: Claims of Territory in the High Desert. A conversation with my “other” community, where both wilderness and a rural way of life are under aggressive assault, The Plan, though completed in a few short months in early 2007, had been stewing for many years. I’ve done community and environmental organizing since 1992 in the half-wild desert land I call home. The frustration level in this work is high, where battles are never fully won and the consequences to real communities and real creatures are hidden in tidal waves of planning documents and corporate propaganda. After 15 years, I was drowning in paper, ink, and exhaustion.

And so The Plan was born, of paper and ink. On Japanese kozo-shi, the desert began to materialize in 11 schematic “landscapes” featuring a defining horizon in an unbounded space. A calligraphic vocabulary of brushwork recorded claims to territory, forcing together the elements that hover unacknowledged by our ahistorical consciousness and our selective sight, as well as those claims so thoroughly incorporated through overexposure, bland repetition, or institutionalization as to be beneath our normal awareness. Other elements were named but left invisible.

Although for me as an artist the transition between these two bodies of work was a natural evolution, the worlds they represent do not rest in such easy conjunction. As shrinking geography and growing technological access bring universes crashing together there is created both a fertility and a danger.

When I showed love full of life in the desert where I live, a community with little context for the finer points of queer identity, I found myself drawing back, describing the theme rather opaquely as simply “nonheterosexual romantic love.” I was concerned that my gender/orientation would become “the” issue and interfere with my ability to work on common causes. As well, I shrank from having my private life exposed to persons who might not understand. Now, bringing The Plan to San Francisco, I wonder how my rural experience can translate meaningfully to an urban audience.

Tension between these spheres remains uncomfortable, with no easy reconciliation or natural understanding. And yet, all of these worlds live within me, and as an artist I must navigate their differences.