INDEX

Queerness is the shape of fabric swept up in the wind. It is making yourself a mother to the land, over and over again, through the carrying of tadpoles in a bottle; teaching boys to makeout with each other using the backs of their palms. It is the heart attack of moving from a city's pace back to the drawl of a gravel road as much as it is the patterns of resilience, assimilation & transmutation that are traced through the wild grasses growing in the cracks of the region's historic abandonment. It is the correlation between coming home and coming out, even if the memory of home is gnarled by the politics of it.

It's All A Song Here is a work of collaboration between kin that lives in the crevice between reckoned with and at odds. Through photographs and installation-based media, my work acknowledges Southern Queer as its own identity within the 2SLGBTQIA+ lexicon through the ways in which it is intrinsically enveloped in iterations and adaptations of tradition, land, and history. It seeks to unravel the performative nature of being Gay Elsewhere through references that are as codified as they are accessible. A clothesline, a rifle with lingerie, surgery scars, the formality of an oil portrait against the flippancy of a backward baseball cap. My imagery draws together the inherent contrasts of being from this place.

In this first chapter, I focus on resilience and self-reliance mixed with the intimacies that form between family, chosen and otherwise. It's All A Song Here is a poem that I will repeat over and over again as I find my accent, the one I’m told I don't have unless I'm with my grandparents, or otherwise strangers become community, allowing their accents to bleed into me while we're dancing, covered in sweat and the smell of damp earth at a house party forty-five minutes south of here.

A solo exhibition of this work took place in August of 2025 in Atlanta at Goat Farm. Excerpts of this work have been featured in Substrate and shown in various shows included, Lumen, a 2025 group exhibition at Atlanta Photography Group. The project has received support from South Arts.