Fire

About

Travis Boyer, Jack Brusca, TM Davy, Raúl de Nieves, Nicole Eisenman, K8 Hardy, Kia Labeija, Matthew Leifheit, Hanna Liden, Tiffany Malakooti, Ryan McNamara, Samuel Roeck, Paul Mpagi Sepuya, Devan Shimoyama, A.L. Steiner, Wolfgang Tillmans, Cajsa von Zeipel

After a friend returned from a long weekend on Fire Island, his coworker asked him what it was like out there.

“Wow, I wish straight people had a place like that,” she replied, when he told her.

“You do,” he said. “It’s called the rest of the world.”

Every time I enter a new room I scan for other queers. Maybe it’s a hunt for fleeting solidarity, maybe safety—not that the two are opposed. I didn’t know I did this until I didn’t have to, when I arrived in a place where “queer” and its variants was the baseline. It is a profound experience, one I will never take for granted, even as I know the exclusions it enacts.

This is a very personal show, in the sense that it has no pretensions of thoroughness or coherence. A series of  friendships and encounters organized around a shared experience of finding one’s place. Just some people inhabiting a tiny speck of the world and—to borrow a phrase by Douglas Crimp, another friend from the island—misfitting together. 

— Ryan McNamara