Cruising In America: East & West
2020 - 2026, Medium Format
This photographic collection explores the public acts of homosexual intimacy across the American landscape. A historical practice born out of necessity, evolved into a fetish predicated on the criminality and anonymity of the act. Informed by my own interactions with cruising, the work reflects on this experience while pursuing a greater conversation with queer history. While some photographs function as forensic documents of lived environments, others imagine or reenact moments that could not be photographed ethically. The documentary photos portray the truth of the experience, while the invented pieces investigate the act of cruising as an abstraction of the queer body within the landscape. The figure and terrain become visually inextricable, yet maintain a push-pull that balances the shared narrative of the lewd and sterile photos. Investigating these sites during daylight hours reveals an inactive and exposed landscape, littered with artifacts of sex. The aftermath evident through disturbed earth, discarded objects and abandoned semen. Working within a personal moral framework, the goal of the series was not to expose those still using the locations as a sexual outlet. Instead, opting for collaborative reenactments of figures staged in familiar positions that gesture toward presence without directly surveilling it. A visual archive built through both dreamy conceptualizations of the body and explicit scenes of penetration.
Cruising In The East
Cruising in the East turns inward, revisiting the familiar terrain of adolescent sexuality through suburban interiors, vehicle cabins, bathroom stalls, and derelict industrial spaces. This chapter revisits the complicated tension carried in these sites. What began as escapism from the heteronormative domestic space developed into a practice of exhibitionism, one shaped by necessity and lustful curiosity. Despite the coveted nature of these marginalized interspaces, there exists a lack of any visual documentation. I wanted to give aesthetic form to the places I remember as nurturing to my developing eroticism. The sexual and obscene photos denote an intention to not glamourize the past, but instead to display scenes of raw intimacy. The work is a way of archiving a complex narrative, and continuing the conversation between landscape, identity, and desire.
Cruising In The East I - XI
Cruising In The West
Cruising in the West carries the series into the exterior, to arid Californian deserts where sexuality coalesces with the echoes of the mythology of the Wild West. Stories consumed in my adolescence, Hollywood goldens and vascular action figures, broadcasted a masculine fantasy of a landscape in which sexual desires roamed on horseback. The West was an ideal of freedom, a perfect Americana sold through consumerist figures like the Cow Boy. Such hypermasculine figures were a catalyst of arousal, a mirage of the perfect sexual being. Upon moving to California I confronted this propagandized frontier and as such confronted how queerness functioned in the landscape. The work in this part of the series sought to capture the paradox of the Western landscape. It is the very vastness of the desert that acts as a blanket for the vulgarity of the act of cruising. The endless horizon presents an emptiness so overwhelming that it conceals the obscene pleasure. One might find themselves distracted by the space even while receiving. The work presents abstracted bodies amongst rock forms and crevasses, discarded artifacts, and sand tracks which compile a different story of a Wild West. These photographs illustrate the history of escapism in the California desert.
Cruising In The West I - XIV