Treading Cheatgrass

Treading Cheatgrass reinterprets photographic mythologies of the American Mountain West and considers how landscape informed the development of my queer sexuality.

Treading Cheatgrass draws upon (my) memories of the cultural myth of the American Mountain West to examine how it shapes and influences sexuality. I was raised from the ages of 8 to 18 in a town of 700 people in rural Idaho (U.S.A.) and felt like an outsider after discovering I was gay in my early adolescence. 

Since my explorative teenage years, I have been faced with a daily choice: to conform to the traditional masculine culture of the Western United States – defined by violence, destruction, and (im)permeability – or to create my own sense of belonging by fading into the land. Through this struggle, my relationship with the idea of place emerges as I insert representations of queerness into photographic mythologies of the West. The interplay of ecstasy, fear, pleasure, cruelty, vigilance, and dominance aims to complicate depictions of desire historically left to the periphery. 

In the images, I look at a landscape that is freeing yet not entirely safe. When I was with lovers, the land offered a refuge for us to be and become imperceptible, yet all the more aware of our own vulnerability.

The work is currently in a malleable sequence of 41 black and white film images, intended to eventually be completed in the form of a photo book and gallery installation. All images were shot between the years 2019 and 2023 and span across Southern Idaho and Montana in the United States.