a queer menagerie
2014
These awkward collected treasures scream out to me with queer affect, confusion of gender, and soft masculinity. With the intention of drawing out my own desire to see tender, vulnerable, fey, queer, and questionable masculinities represented in material and pop culture, I documented my collection of figurines in a decidedly subjective manner akin to ‘cruising’ rather than cataloguing, resisting my own desire to cohere them into a unified collection by approaching them each in the same ‘neutral’ or unified manner as does the museum, instead choosing a historically-charged and queer mode of looking. The extremely shallow depth of field and selective points of focus in the images mimic human eyesight, unable to take in the whole at the same time as the detail; yet even in the blurry periphery we read gesture, posture, colour, form. The acts both of cruising and of collecting/documenting/cataloguing/naming are fraught with colonial baggage and I tread this ground lightly, acknowledging queerness as culturally contingent and my looking eye as imposing my own desire upon these figures; I select and draw forth the subjectively desired attributes in conscious resistance to the refusal of queered masculinity and genderqueerness in mainstream North American culture at large. The images here represent a selection from the greater project.
2014
These awkward collected treasures scream out to me with queer affect, confusion of gender, and soft masculinity. With the intention of drawing out my own desire to see tender, vulnerable, fey, queer, and questionable masculinities represented in material and pop culture, I documented my collection of figurines in a decidedly subjective manner akin to ‘cruising’ rather than cataloguing, resisting my own desire to cohere them into a unified collection by approaching them each in the same ‘neutral’ or unified manner as does the museum, instead choosing a historically-charged and queer mode of looking. The extremely shallow depth of field and selective points of focus in the images mimic human eyesight, unable to take in the whole at the same time as the detail; yet even in the blurry periphery we read gesture, posture, colour, form. The acts both of cruising and of collecting/documenting/cataloguing/naming are fraught with colonial baggage and I tread this ground lightly, acknowledging queerness as culturally contingent and my looking eye as imposing my own desire upon these figures; I select and draw forth the subjectively desired attributes in conscious resistance to the refusal of queered masculinity and genderqueerness in mainstream North American culture at large. The images here represent a selection from the greater project.