Flight Map
Michael Khuth
My lens-based practice embraces photography and collage as visual languages to articulate and reflect on queerness, femininity, and transformation. Through image-making I explore the relationship between collage and queerness as processes and ways of being that continuously rely on the transformation of materials and self. By writing over, tearing, taping, folding, rearranging, and re-photographing images, I create layered photo-collages that acknowledge the photograph and queerness
as forever evolving.
In my most recent body of work, Flight Map, I collage found family photographs, original photography, and written anecdotes from my queer relatives––Rithy Vang and Tony Khuth––to grab hold of multiple queer histories within my family. In this work collage serves as a way to piece together meeting points
between disparate generations. Our queerness is not isolated from one another; it exists in the same place and time. It does not fade into a whisper but instead is woven into my family’s visual memory. Here, the fragments of our queer flight—with all of their young decisions, leaving, distance, and transformation—are woven together into an assemblage of queer lineage and knowledge.
While creating this work, I often returned to an interview with the poet Ocean Vuong where he claims that, “queer folks rarely have instruction manuals...a lot of our way towards desire is also towards self knowledge. We learn on the fly. We shame failure, but for queer folks, failure becomes a necessary praxis towards success.” Reflecting further on my experiences growing up as queer and Khmer, I began to realize there was always this search for affirmation, guidance, a community to belong to. And so I begin this work with a question: What are the maps I want to leave behind, and which ones have been there all along?
