The world incites a daily battle to define the self in concrete, binary terms. Like Water features queer artists that surge into an expanse beyond solutions. In this expanse, fixed markers like gender, identity, and the self are uprooted and treated as verbs. This fluidity - in understanding, in process, and in rejection of what we know we must dispossess, becomes a beacon to liberation.

 

Unraveling the rigidity of the self involves delving into the deepest pools of our existence. In the stickiness of the interior, these artists comb through inherent, inherited, and learned layers of identity. Some are faced with clashing cultural traditions and generational lineages. Some with the uneasy confrontation that comes with being intimate with the self. And some, amidst the chaos, find lifelines of care, softness, and stillness for themselves, which is a radical act in itself.

 

In memorializing these explorations as artworks, many of these works can be seen as fantastical, or at the very least beckoning towards an imagined future. However, these artists reveal queer futurity to be deeper than a deviation from our timeline into an imagined alternate state. Reimagined futures reveal pockets of liberation in the present, and serve as tools for tangible deconstruction. Queer futurity is prophetic because it already exists.

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Featured Artists: Abraham Eliseo Medellin, Bradley Lock, Clifford Prince King, Felony Dodger, Gigie Hall, Ilaria de Plano, Jheyda McGarrell, Kat Chavez, Malachi, Valentine Amari, Paarsa Hajari