2027 SPE Annual Conference: Community in Contrast
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print this pageThe Chasm of the Reach: Photographic Strategies in Queering Desire
Student Presentation
Friday, October 23 - 5:15PM to 5:25PM
WCAD 101
This presentation shares my ongoing research and practice examining photography and language as a form of self-fashioning queer identity and performing desire as it manifests in absence, dissolve, and imagination. During the session, I will discuss the development of several projects that each deal with not only the representation of queerness, but how images can function as "queer" through formal strategies and conceptual discourses. These projects not only focus on personal translations of queer desire and experience, but are also exercises in endeavoring to more broadly understand the functions of desire through gesture and signification.
My practice has largely centered around having recurring dreams of queer, erotic experiences that were not part of my identity or desire in my waking, conscious life. What began as a practice of dream journaling quickly became a ritual in piecing together a new understanding of my queer identity and sexuality, allowing these once latent desires to manifest in my conscious life. In reframing the visual and literary legacy of Surrealism, the work challenges the implications of looking, depicting, and performing queerness for the camera.
Using darkroom and alternative printing experimentation, the erotic is conjured through a surreal, hyper-reality that exists in images' haptic details that engage in visual frustration. I am looking at what exists in between words, the tension that is created by what lies beyond the frame. The photographs are perhaps by their nature a tease, nothing more than fragments of a larger, inaccessible whole. They exist at the edge, at the sliver of skin never fully revealed, at the touch never consummated. The more you look, the harder they refuse; what desires are felt in the space between?
speaker
Rose Cunningham
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