Tread Lightly

“Tread Lightly” is a photograph-based project of worn surfaces, collaged materials, and obscured depictions that merge to create a space of queer reflection. Through a combination of organic matter, human-made objects, and close-up self-portraits, a relationship between materiality and the body evokes tension within each image. The photographs, collages, and photo transfers build regenerative spaces that find new ways of seeing and understanding, where expressions of intimacy and tenderness take shape out of abstracted representations. Together the imagery visualizes themes that look towards queerness as multiple ways of being – through rigidity and softness, evolution and disintegration, connection and disconnection. Their disorienting perspectives question what is alive, what is breathing, what is decaying, and what is changing. Queerness here is not defined, but offered instead as a fluid identity encompassing sexual freedom, transformation, and expansive ways of becoming.