“Formation”—a paradox of a word. A dance or military formation connotes order, confidence, collective power, but the process of formation, usually the opposite. Becoming is often a mess. It can throw you off, isolate.
This dichotomy is at the heart of queerness. It’s the hope of chosen community: becoming a radical, unforeseeable version of yourself in a circle of people doing the same.
In mourning, I find myself on a wet pillow suffocated // by the conflation of alien affection.
ALTAmy Yao’s Doppelgängers (2016), a structure that combines pearls, rice, and plastic imitations of both, considers how observation alone is not always able to identify authenticity from verisimilitude. It challenges the viewer to gaze at the mound and question whether they are looking at the true object, imitations of the object, or whether that even matters to begin with.
Individual Collectivity: Scratching at the Moon at ICA Los Angeles
ALTIndividual Collectivity: Scratching at the Moon at ICA Los Angeles
Contrasting with the video art, a table displays an array of domestic objects which are arranged in an orderly cluster, documenting the subjects of a plethora of images that Amanda Ross-Ho found in her father’s own photography portfolio. The work, Untitled Prop Archive (THE PORTFOLIO) (2024) combines found objects with fabricated ones, placed on a table that imitates that which she remembers from her childhood home. Beyond the sculptural work is a large lightbox containing a water-damaged image of Ross-Ho’s father, who practiced as a photographer in a commercial photography studio, standing behind an arrangement of boxes containing laundry detergent and trash bags, at work. The striking image is framed in such a way that it looks almost as if he is sitting at the table, presiding over all the domestic goods that he once photographed. Ross-Ho’s work, much like the rest of the exhibition, evokes a sense of vulnerability, domesticity, and intimacy.
Image: Installation view of Scratching at the Moon, Institute of Contemporary Art, Los Angeles, February 10–July 28, 2024. Photo: Jeff McLane / ICA LA
In the 1980s, stranger danger was a real thing, prompted by the abduction of Adam Walsh, who in July 1981, had been shopping with his mother at a Florida mall when she left him alongside several other boys playing an Atari game. She was gone for less than 10 minutes. His abduction set the nation on high alert. Children like me were told to stick together and to be watchful for strangers. “Somewhere along the way, we allowed fear to get inside us,” says Paul Crenshaw in Salon. “Stranger danger made us fear strangers, so we began to see everyone as dangerous.”
Melissa Fraterrigo, The Perils of Girlhood
I’m myself
sitting in the Sistine Chapel
very miserable and
very sexy
This sense of not-to-be is what cis-gendered people often don’t understand about transitioning. Their discourse around our bodies, where we are allowed to exist, hinges on the idea that we are men and women who want to be the opposite. If they would talk to one trans person, they may realize that passing, a desire not shared by all trans people, is not about being cis-gender.
Despite the ideological faults, so much of being trans, for me and others, is about inhabiting a non-being in terms of a binary, normative gender.
On the plate, something fuzzy and teal extended itself to her and waved. Min reached out a careful finger to poke it and found that it was warm and slightly slimy. She wiped the residue on the front of her shirt.
“What are you?” she asked. “Mold?”
I’M MOLD,
said the mold,
BUT YOU CAN CALL ME BOTRYS.
Read: We Love Because HE Loved Us First by Ava Guihama Olson
