queer landscape

Landscape is a perspective, an aesthetic, a genre. Landscape encodes a way of seeing, a way of relating, a way of being.

Historically, representations of landscape have been sutured to projects of domination and the subject positions that dream them up. The wide sweeping frames, the implicit directionality of the gaze, the illusion of a detached, totalizing perspective – these elements of landscape representations have been entangled in the aesthetic, psychological and logistical concerns of a colonial project defined by its apparent mastery over nature and all those considered to be ‘of’ it.

queer landscape seeks to disrupt and defamiliarize this genre of landscape. It is an experiment in queer visuality: a mode of seeing, of sense-making, that encodes a different way of knowing, representing, and relating to our worlds. These compositions have been created through the montaging of 35mm slides I have collected over the years from geographers, hobby naturalists, and anonymous others. Montage is an inherently queer method, blurring time and space, jostling parts and wholes, creating uncanny juxtapositions. These montages are made possible by the horizon of landscape photography: by the negative space – the sky – that frames the landscape perspective. It is no coincidence that queerness should confront us at the horizon: horizons are a motif of queer geographical imaginings. A space of becoming, a not-yet-here, a sense of dawning, a pull of directionality, horizons capture the utopic imaginings of queer futurity, the promise of queer space.

What makes these landscape queer? Time & space folder over on each other, perspective gone slantwise, boundary crossing between here & there, the real and imagined. Something that can’t quite be made out of the horizon, a not-yet-here, an epistemological elsewhere. A kind of utopian sensibility: a sketch on the horizon, worlds imagined, drawn into being. It’s a distinctly queer utopia: soft & hopeful, broken & impossible. Fantastical birds take flight toward a horizon punctuated by a chain-link fence: this aching desire for an impossible kind of escape. Soft, otherworldly fields blanket a cityscape, layered & torn, textured & warm. A enchanted forest takes root somewhere unlikely – on a craggy outcropping or perhaps a vessel – motion blurred, unmoored from here & now. Utopia a kind of fuzzy, out-of-focus intimacy, a someplace else.

queer landscape will be exhibited in the gallery show Against Nature in March 2023 at Union Hall Gallery, Denver. It will also be submitted to the 2023 issue of you are here: the journal of creative geography which focuses on the theme counter/cartographies.