Light is a poem filled with flares of memory and unnamed feelings. I place a  spotlight on images that have a desire to be seen. Shadows linger on beautiful moments that went unnoticed. I struggle to place experiences in the past, present, or future but light and my perception of is it the constant through each memory. It is the blurred link that makes me whole. I shine a light on my past. In one memory, I am at a park rolling down a muddy hill with my cousins. There is no known pressure of genderroles, yet. The ground collapses under us, and I- age twenty-four realize that I once knew what being free felt like. My work uses light as tool to process the feelings behind each of these memories. I use digital and film photography to create stories that center my black and nonbinary imagination. In his book Cruising Utopia: The Then and There of Queer Futurity, Dr. José Esteban Muñoz asks us to reimagine queerness and proposes a “Queer Utopia” that keeps it in the horizon. Moving toward the future has been one long excavation into the past. With each memory that I recall, I discover something new about myself. This  is how I pull myself into the future.

Featured Image: Asherde Gill, untitled self-portrait, 2019. Courtesy of the artist.