THREE ORIGINS FOR QUEER / LOVE

Queer / Love: An Emerging Bibliography is my attempt to document the soil within which a large portion of my art-making originates. It is the result of three different soils coming together, which created the conditions for its emergent form of documentation.

To best understand the context of Queer / Love: An Emerging Bibliography, I have written a bit about each soil & the nutrients it offers to the collective soil.

SOIL ONE: Study as Art Practice

Study is a large part of my art-making practice. Even though I always struggled in school (I attempted and failed college three times), I've never lost my passion for learning. I love being curious about the world / cosmos and (re)discovering all the ways in which things be, operate, work, function. I'm so often surprised that something in this here & now is the result of so many things that came before and often in ways that have intentionally (and violently) hidden their origins. This curiosity & (re)discoveries fuel my thoughts, beliefs, patterns, behaviors, expression. This is my art.

Nutrients: curiosity, inquiry, deep listening & witnessing, meaning-making, a sense of time-space within cosmologies

SOIL TWO: Queer Love Zine

I was invited into a group show this past February at Ingleside Gallery exploring the question, "What is love?" I knew immediately I wanted to make something about Queer Love, so I reached out to my dear friend & comrade Crystal Mason. We set aside some time to dream and then shared our queer love dreams with each other. This process helped us co-create our first Queer Love Zine, which we gave away at Ingleside Gallery.

Our Queer Love dreams are not just ours. As we dreamt, we realized that instead of providing answers to the question, "What is Queer Love," we wanted to offer portals through which one could (re)discover answers for themselves. It was a queering of Queer Love, a way for us to question assumptions about who we as queers love and who loves us in return.

And it invited me into deep inquiry about who I see as the originators of my own understanding of queer / love.

Nutrients: opening hearts, radical love, all our relations, portals through which to travel all time-space / cosmologies, camaraderie, dreams & dreaming

SOIL THREE: Simple Documentation

My ADHD means I lose track of things quite repeatedly and endlessly, which makes remembering details fuzzy. My incessant need to want to revisit that which has sparked deep curiosity & inquiry makes me hella frustrated with my ADHD. Thus, I am always on the lookout for ways to help me simplify documentation, aka ways of remembering.

About five or six years ago, a dear comrade, Lucia Palmerini, introduced me to Airtable, which is an online, customizable database. It's taken me a while to fully figure out its utility. There is so much it can do that its a bit overwhelming. But I kept using it for projects here & there to track contacts, tasks, etc.

In 2020, I committed to using it more as a core function of my art making practice. This meant really examining what I wanted / needed / desired to track and document. One thing I need is better reference materials for my art. So I built a spreadsheet collecting books, videos, podcasts, archival material, etc. that I've read / watched / listened to that I want to remember and reference.

Now, I have a growing archive that I can apply to specific projects, inquiries, and art. 

Nutrients: simplicity, repetition, iteration, data collection, revisiting, functionality, inquiry

Mixing & Sharing the Queer / Love Soil

As I examined these three soils separately, I noticed I could mix them together to form soil that was even more nutritious than they would be separately. So I set to task revisiting each and ensuring that the soil itself was, in fact, fertile. This meant pulling some weeds or rocks (light data editing), adding in some more nutrients (additional data entry), and loosely demarcating the edges of this particular soil (categorizing entries as Queer Love).

The result of all this is: Queer / Love: An Emerging Bibliography.

I will be continuing to add to it and create from it. And one such fabulous thing is a brand new zine called: "Some Quotes That Define Queer / Love, Volume 1."