Zoe Walsh: When the breezes start

“Queer histories are made of affective relations…”

—    Carolyn Dinshaw, Getting Medieval: Sexualities and Communities, Pre- and Postmodern, 1999

Zoe Walsh makes sprawling, intricate paintings that both materially and conceptually hover at the edge of legibility, interrogating notions of what it means to both look at and live in a queer body. By fabulating visual worlds built on queer feeling and sociality, Walsh puts desire at the center of their artmaking process, seeking pleasurable connections across time that evade final truth or meaning.

Walsh’s process starts in the queer archive. Their previous body of work was populated by poolside figures drawn from the ONE National Gay and Lesbian Archives’ holdings of the groundbreaking gay porn house Falcon Studios. Returning to ONE in the fall of 2021, Walsh came across the work of filmmaker and photographer Pat Rocco who, in the late 1960s and without permission, shot amorous, often nude men on Hollywood Boulevard, at Disneyland, and in Griffith Park, which remains a site of gay cruising to the present day. Drawing on Rocco’s landscape pictures, Walsh has embarked on a new body of work that explores the sites of the public park and the private garden. For the first time, they have supplemented their archival images with original photos staged with friends. These poses respond to Rocco’s work as well as a promiscuous genealogy of queer gesture that includes excerpts from Henrik Olesen’s Some Faggy Gestures, mid-century men’s physique magazines, and documentation of Yvonne Rainer dance performances.

The first step in Walsh’s process is to trace silhouettes from both Rocco’s photos and their own and place them into a three-dimensional digital model. This virtual world is populated by references to Los Angeles plant life such as Yucca trees and poppies as well as local park and garden architecture including benches, fences, and trellises documented on the artist’s walks or taken from garden design publications. From this simulation, Walsh creates various mise-en-scène that are fragmented and then transferred onto large silk screens that they use to print onto canvas, using up to 25 screens per panel. Applied repeatedly with acrylic paint in CMYK (the classic four color channels—cyan, magenta, yellow, and key/black—although Walsh uses burnt umber in place of black), the strata of screen prints stack up to make densely layered scenes with a spectrum of vibrant color combinations. Often, the edges of the screens are visible on the surface—slight misregistrations in the overall composition.These digital thresholds disrupt and refuse a viewing experience defined by visual immersion in anahistorical utopic landscape—historically, the desired effect of imperialist and colonialist regimes. Instead, Walsh emphasizes the materiality of the painting by showing how it is stitched together, revealing the technologies used to make it.

After the screen printing is complete, Walsh studies the resulting compositions and determines where to add additional layers of complex shapes and textures that are created using digitally cut vinyl stencils. With these adhesive templates—applied directly onto the canvas surface—paint is put on layer by layer using squeegees and spatulas. Countless coats create a subtle texture on the surface. Although the works appear to be eminently flat, the dozens of montaged layerscreate an effect of translucency that is responsive to changes in light, ultimately creating rippling visual fluctuations between surface and depth. The paintings evince a certain narrative shiftiness as well. Even though they seem to invite a kind of fictive reading that involves identifying bodies in relation to one another, they are not totally legible. The artist’s narrative cues are ultimately red herrings. In indexing but obscuring bodies and sites from the queer archive, Walsh highlights the fact that the queer archive is itself a space of uncertainty to begin with. Despite the archive’s appearance of coherent order, it is never complete—its gaps and erasures inviting speculative reimagining. Walsh uses historical material not as factual proof of visible existence, but instead to create an ambiguous historiography of queer gestures. They pursue archival excess, desire for that which eludes bureaucratic containment. In scattering repeated forms across multiple panels, Walsh proposes shimmering, elusive, and fugitive fictions.

Scholar Carolyn Dinshaw has theorized a queer approach to historical material defined by “making affective connections … across time.”[1] This pursuit of the past is marked by pleasure, “a profound desire for connectedness that was often a desire for touching across time,” as she phrased it.[2] Refusing a linear narration of history (a teleological story that seeks ultimate truth revealed at the end of time), Dinshaw argued that “with such queer historical touches we could form communities across time”—an evocative description that resonates with Walsh’s practice.[3]

Building on Dinshaw’s work, scholar Elizabeth Freeman proposed an “erotohistoriography” in her 2010 book Time Binds: Queer Temporalities, Queer Histories. Freeman explains: [E]rotohistoriography indexes how queer relations complexly exceed the present. It insists that various queer social practices, especially those involving enjoyable bodily sensations, produce form(s) of time consciousness, even historical consciousness, that can intervene upon the material damage done in the name of development. Against pain and loss, erotohistoriography posits the value of surprise, of pleasurable interruptions and momentary fulfillments from elsewhere, other times.[4] In Freeman’s model, it is our present-day embodied sensations that provide us with “portals to historical thinking” and ways to connect with the past.[5]

Walsh’s works demonstrate the artist’s desire to touch through time, to imagine visual erotohistoriographies. They are deeplyconcerned with not only how to approach and understand queer history, but also how to visualize queer people and queer experience. Their material approach is defined by opacities and refusals, shifting legibility, and bodily forms that are hard to totally grasp. Contemplating the vicissitudes of trans subjectivity, the paintings teeter between surface and depth, delaying the closure of ultimate truth. Walsh’s lushly rendered imaginary spaces are a form of world-making for queer people in which queerness, as José Esteban Muñoz put it, is “always in the horizon.”[6]

 – Text by Ashton Cooper