Alchemists

With multidisciplinary work from 18 trans artists, Alchemists explores how queer bodies, lives, and desires interact with and transform the natural world. Queer figures emerge from stone, are formed from clay, and are collaged together with topographical maps. Sculptors shape and fire lumps of earth, a painter activates pigments with water, and a photographer exposes film negatives to the sun to create cyanotype prints. To create The Lamb, Richards' transferred photos of a woman onto camel bone and framed the work with the jaw of a deer. The artists work deftly with elements and organic materials such as sunlight, metal, water, clay, glass, fiber, animal bones, and wax to push and pull the earth to meet their artistic need. In addition to materiality, the subject matter of the work expresses a connection to the natural world. In one photograph, two lovers embrace in the foam of ocean waves, in another, hands dig open-palmed into the wet coastline. Quilts are pieced together with images of the Ozarks, and a jacquard weaving depicts live wires cutting across a sun-scattered forest floor. Most literally, Earth Ængel's wax painting renders a trail of gynandromorph lobsters, born exactly half male and half female. While the works are evidence of trans hands shaping the earth and offer a window into a queer connection to nature, they also reveal how trans bodies, desires, and lives transform the natural world into spaces of queer reverence. Kaden Bard Dawson's cyanotype depicts Ethereal as almost saint-like, emerging nearly nude on the grass, transforming the otherwise empty meadow into a site of sacred beauty (L). Summer Surgent's Forever Cowboys captures both a trans couple kissing on their wedding day and the power of queer love to convert the worst strip of Rockaway Beach into a holy site. And Aida Lodge's heat-formed steel sculpture Transmutation (accepted routes from there to here) actualizes a previously impossible route of water, moving in an arch with puddles on both sides. As a whole, the exhibition explores transness and the natural world affecting each other in a push and pull of creation, formation, and transformation. Throughout the works, trans artists and their subjects are revealed as alchemists, taking the natural materials given to them and transforming them into a holy sublime.