DESCRIPTION

Queerness and death are interwoven in a frayed burial shroud. Through the rips of this tattered fabric, we witness queer, trans, and gender non-conforming people exiled from family units and shunned by their communities, while simultaneously confronting an oblivion of health disparities: AIDS, structural discrimination, state violence, physical assault, suicide, and murder. Though all non-heteronormative individuals face these terrors, trans women of color are the most vulnerable to harm.

Filmed in a graveyard and using in-camera double exposure techniques, the queers in Leather Graves defy the inherent asphyxiation of the burial shroud by devouring candy-coated blossoms in acts of self-preservation and defiance.

REFERENCES / RECOMMENDATIONS

Atmospheres of Violence. Eric Stanley, 2021.

Call Out Queen Zine: Mark Aguhar. Edited by Juana Peralta & Roy Pérez, 2010 - 2012.

Is the Rectum a Grave? Leo Bersani, 1987.

Let the Record Show: A Political History of ACT UP New York, 1987 - 1993. Sarah Schulman, 2022.

October, 1984. Arthur Johnson Weiss, 2016.

Queer Youth are Five Times More Likely to Die by Suicide. Andrea Gibson, 2021.

Stone Butch Blues. Leslie Feinberg, 1993.

Time is the Thing a Body Moves Through. T Fleischmann, 2019.

“Untitled” (Portrait of Ross in L.A.). Felix Gonzalez-Torres, 1991.

Carmen Scott (she/her) is an artist living in Chicago, IL.

Frankie Symonds Nasiatka (she/her) is a queer multimedia artist and curated based in Boston. She founded the Shoe Bones art gallery in Salem, MA in 2022.

Killah Croc (they/them) is a Boston-based drag artist who has made a name for themself in the Boston drag scene since February 2023. Recently, Killah won the historic All-Star Mondays competition and Boston Drag Gauntlet Cycle 11. Killah also made history as one of the first drag artists to perform at The Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum with their drag family The House of Calypso. Don't let Killah’s simplistic approach to drag fool you; their command of the song and  stage will leave you full but also wanting more. Killah uses their platform to uplift their fellow Black & Brown Trans Artists of Color.

Lindsey Rae (she/her) is an artist and nurse living in Chicago, IL.

Math-you Land-Vote (they/he/she) is a multimedia artist and musician based in Chicago.

Marten Katze (he/him) is a transsexual actor and artist living in Chicago with his lover Math-you.

Nathan Hill (they/them) is a multimedia artist working in analog video, 16mm film, video installation, and sculpture. Their films and videos have screened widely, including in Videosyntezy 3 (Legnicia, Poland), Light Field (San Francisco), MIX NYC, and the Hacker Film Festival (Rome). They have been an artist in residence at Signal Culture (2018) in upstate New York and were an Affiliate Artist at the Headlands Center for the Arts in California (2019 - 2020). Nathan is currently studying at MassArt in Boston.

Tomás de las Casas (they/them) holds an MA in Sociology from Boston College and BA in Chemistry from Cornell University.

W.O.V (they/them) creates figurative works on handmade paper and handmade laminate paper objects. They experiment with specific papermaking “recipes” such as the combination of used semen-stained rags, coffee, tobacco, and sugarcane fibers to embed their materials with a distinctly queerly Cuban conceptual origin that is built directly into the work. W.O.V was born in Sancti Spíritus, Cuba and raised in Miami, Florida. They obtained their Bachelor of Fine Arts and a certification in Art History from the University of South Florida in 2020. They received a Master of Fine Arts from School of the Museum of Fine Arts at Tufts University in 2024 and were a Collective Futures Fund grantee in 2024.