Best Lives

I built an app that searched Instagram for thirty queer hashtags, #instagay, #nonbinary, #genderfluid, and told me when someone posting them was within ten miles of me. Then I wrote to them and asked if they wanted to meet and make a picture together.

We shot until we got something they liked. They chose the final image, not me, and they posted it themselves. Then I took the picture they had already decided was them, blew it up to heroic scale, and built each one a frame.

I grew up going to the Met and looking at society portraits in giant gold frames. Those frames were telling me these people mattered. I wanted to trigger that same response. I wanted the thirst traps and selfies of queer people to be the society portraits of today, so I made the frames myself, each one detailed for the person in it. They are large enough that in a room they feel like bodies, and light enough that they look like they could float away.

I was making this at the same time as Insufficient Memory, and I needed to. That work was hard every day, and making something unapologetically celebratory was how I got myself out of the dark. The two hung in opposite rooms in Thirst/Trap.