I envision the way a body would fit in this space. I see the absence of form and imagine which bodies are left out, which bodies are told they do not belong in many spaces. On 35mm film I photographed my friend, my lover, because they are a representation of the bodies I love and am in community with. My community is not a monolith; my community is queer, nonbinary and trans. My images hold the significance of their predecessors' politics and simultaneously speak to a future in which our bodies may find relaxation, the way we create our own belonging. These images are a place of rest and relaxation, late summer sunset-soaked joy, that disappears the need to do anything. To be held and find place, even in a world that says you may be at odds with it.

Silhouettes is a direct reference to Ana Mendieta’s Silueta series, the visuals a nod to Laura Aguilar. Since the moment I was introduced to the late artist Ana Mendieta’s work, she has never left my mind. A pioneer of earth-body art in the 1970s, Mendieta created a language for grief, belonging, exile, objectivity and violence using just her body and the natural world. How proximities to thinness and whiteness determine desirability and artistic merit. Mendieta being Cuban American, in opposition to the white feminism of her time, her own history of displacement. I think of Laura Aguilar and how she created space for bodies like hers with self portraiture. Her entire oeuvre, but particularly her 2006 series “Grounded” letting her fat Latina lesbian body be a mirror of natural formations. My work exists because Mendieta and Aguilar carved that space, for marginalized bodies to be seen in the art world and reflected in the natural world.