Boundless

Nathan Storey

There is an erotic and poetic relationship between the eyes and the brain. The cornea  bends; light rays pass through the round hole of the pupil. The iris contracts itself, regulating the  amount of light. The lens transmutes the shape of light into circles to feed the retina. The retina  converts the light into electrical impulses. The optic nerve sends these little impulses to the brain to materialize the image. Even in this complex synergy, there are of course flaws, illusions, and  weaknesses.  
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My interdisciplinary studio practice investigates visual disruption, the queer as the  natural, and print media as a boundless form of resistance. Through engaging methodologies of  photography, printmaking, and performance, I compose installations and images that complicate  the body, language, culture, and nature to propose new ways of seeing.  
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In Cruising Utopia, José Esteban Muñoz contends, “We may never touch queerness, but  we can feel it as the warm illumination of a horizon imbued with potentiality.” Reckoning with  Muñoz, I conceive of projects through writing poetry and collaging imagery aimed at discovering  glimpses, shimmers, and windows into queerness, utopia, and liberation.  
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We no longer see only with our eyes; we absorb images with our skin. Our nervous  system constantly soaks up our surroundings: a multiplicity of pictures, encrypted billboards,  burning mountains, labyrinthine urban streets, blinding sunshine, distorted reflections, and  flickering screens all enter our porous organ. I accumulate imagery and language, feel for their  limits, examine their innards, and reconstruct. This is an act of weaving and stitching together  disparate forces of nature. The work is innocent, de-socialized, and a peek into queerness.  
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A personal and poetic narrative is sewn alongside threads of social, cultural, and political symbols. The work meditates on the desire and fear to reveal oneself, longing for queer lineage, and an ache for the gravitational pull toward another body. I position the queer existence as, in fact, a part of our ecology, rejecting the longstanding notion that difference and deviance are “against nature.” Our minds and bodies are unique organisms that are constantly changing, developing, and reinventing themselves alongside fire, earth, wind, and water. We are endlessly seeking the sublime and the mystic.  
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Throughout history, print media has been instrumental to resistance and change. Print is  intrinsic to our visibility and liberation as members of the queer community. I ruminate on  handmade picket signs from the 1969 Stonewall Riots to our ongoing fight toward a more  inclusive, antiracist society. My prints respond to the past and present with a sense of  vulnerability and fragility while simultaneously reimagining the future. I am interested in the  physical and corporeal aspect of printmaking and photography; the processes ask our bodies to  capture, coat, develop, expose, pull, spin, and wash to produce the print. My work pushes the  boundaries of traditional photography and printmaking by employing alchemical and reactive  processes, distorting dimension, and transforming the surface of an image.  
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My practice is a cooperation of my body, forgotten histories, headlines, memories,  dreams, folklore, and ephemera. I intend to break boundaries, dance between the intersection of  the personal and the political, and cultivate a space for healing through the act of storytelling.  Embodying, searching, and questioning are the windows into queerness, utopia, and liberation.