On Being Led

2025

It wasn’t until I broke the threshold of my first apartment in New York and looked up to see a postcard of Duane Michals’ The Illuminated Man pinned above the entry, that I began to recognize absence as a kind of divine intervention. A figure, deep in the shadow of a tunnel, suddenly shot through with light, felt like an “X” to certify my footsteps. A path finally located and suddenly I was seeing holes all over. 

'On Being Led' records my stumbling in a dimmed world. It collects evidence of small illuminations: light leaking through windows, bodies marked by an insistence to act, surfaces bearing the residue of past touch. These photographs are glimpses of something guiding, but never explicitly naming itself. They trace an instinctual way of moving: toward softness, toward ambiguity, toward the glint of a portal just slightly ajar.

The series asks what it means to look at the world queerly—not just through identity, but through a visual language of disruption, tenderness, and attention. It shapes how light is registered, how gestures are understood, how meaning slips and reforms across surfaces.