Michael Espinoza

My experience of queerness is miraculous, varied, connecting, and complicated. With recent bodies of work I am focusing on some of the tensions that arise as a consequence of living in an intersectional body: tensions between showing and hiding, material and representation, seeing and not seeing, and indeed between vitality and death. These tensions for me are about queer survival, as we must both be legible to find each other, but also must be covert and sometimes hide to maintain safety. Survival is the key magnetic force that brings queer communities together. I wish to celebrate this and also memorialize the attempts at survival which have left many of our comrades as ancestors. 

The reason I first combined textile with a Polaroid was for a very practical reason: the model wished to remain anonymous. The naked, sexually aroused image of a queer body posed certain consequences to the model. Not wanting to hide the utter beauty of a queer person or the intimacy of this image, I partially covered the Polaroid with the textile copy. I began to realize that this combination satisfied many of my objectives: showing and hiding at the same time, proposing an alternative visual language for queer survival, and creating the illusion of transparency. I make textile by producing an embroidery pattern with the aid of a software specifically designed to see colors and assemble them on a grid. After correcting colors, I hand-embroider the pattern, using my body as a human printer. In this way, I see this as an alternative photographic printing process. Though this work will undoubtedly convey the analogue and the hand made, I fundamentally see these works as digital or at least in cooperation with the digital. 

Images from this body of work were made in places designated for queer joy: my bedroom, my studio, San Francisco, Iwash (Rooster Rock State Park), and at a private sex party.