Doors 6:30p
Program 7:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re thrilled to come together with the American LGBTQ+ Museum, in partnership with the Incite Institute at Columbia University for Queer Ecologies, a unique night that celebrates the intersection of the natural world and the LGBTQ+ community. Programmed with writer / art historian specializing in queer art and culture Ksenia M. Soboleva, this program features a curated selection of films and oral histories highlighting diverse perspectives on nature, identity, and personal journeys within the LGBTQ+ spectrum.

This selection of thought-provoking films and intimate storytelling explores connections between the natural world and queer experience, from Sasha Wortzel’s punk rock fairytale that brings to life the portraiture of Shoog McDaniel — a fat, queer, and disabled photographer working in and around northern Florida’s vast network of freshwater spring, to what Soboleva describes recently in Bomb Magazine as Amina Ross’s “deeply visceral, imagery…[that] heightens viewers’ awareness of the relationship to their own body and its movements through a world that is seemingly more concerned with demolishing than building.”

We’ll also be invited to listen in on a sample from J. Wortham’s forthcoming oral history project that delves into elders resilience amidst changing tides and explore Ohan Breiding’s reflection on collective care and memory through the telling of the Rhône glacier and Rhône river that connects the Swiss Alps to the Mediterranean Sea.

Each work uniquely sheds light on the beauty, challenges, and resilience often found within the these intersections between our natural world and identity. 

Whether you are a nature enthusiast, an LGBTQ+ ally, or someone interested in engaging this notion of queer ecologies, this event offers a space for reflection, celebration, and meaningful dialogue.  Join us as we delve into compelling stories that inspire, educate, and amplify voices often underrepresented in mainstream media at the crossroads of nature and LGBTQ+ experiences.

A conversation will follow the program with featured artists Amina Ross, Sasha Wortzel, Ohan Breiding & J.Wortham moderated by Suhaly Bautista-Carolina Director of Public Programs & Partnerships at the American LGBTQ+ Museum. 

Special thanks to Baldwin for the Arts and the rest of our collaborators Kenia Hale (Incite Institute), Michael Falco (Incite Institute), & SC Lucier (American LGBTQ+ Museum) for all their efforts to bring together this celebratory night of works.

Program

Belly of a Glacier: Chapter 2 (Rhône) by Ohan Breiding

14:15 mins, 2023, 2k video, 16mm, sound

Belly of a Glacier: Chapter 2, Rhône (2023) uses experimental documentary strategies to reflect on the Rhône glacier and Rhône river that connects the Swiss Alps to the Mediterranean Sea. During the last three springs, the neighboring Rhône glacier town residents have draped thermal blankets over the five-acres long glacier. This is a community-initiated project that insulates the Alpine landscape from the rising temperatures, and experiments with new strategies of ecological care as the Rhône is predicted to have fully disappeared by 2050. Belly of a Glacier: Chapter 2, Rhône translates a hyperobject–an object or event whose dimensions in space and time are massive in relation to a human/animal life–into haptic imagery of melting ice, disintegrating fabric, photographs of photographs my mother took on the Rhône glacier during my childhood and the bovidae that rely on the glaciers water for survival. Beginning with a cow birth that poetically connects to the climactic calving of a glacier, this video offers a new conception of time (beyond the linear), and place (beyond fixity). Through a focus on affect, the memory of ice and collective care, I gesture towards a trans reimagining of our material world and amplify the current state of climate emergency.

How to Carry Water by Sasha Wortzel

This punk rock fairytale doubles as a portrait of Shoog McDaniel — a fat, queer, and disabled photographer working in and around northern Florida’s vast network of freshwater springs, the state’s source of precious drinking water. For over a decade, Shoog’s photographs have transformed the way fat people view themselves and how a fat phobic society views fat bodies. Bringing Shoog’s photography to life, the film immerses audiences in a world of fat beauty and liberation, one in which marginalized bodies — including bodies of water — are sacred.

14:25 mins

Waterfront Queer Stories: Elders Resilience Amidst Changing Tides by J. Wortham (sample)

This project is produced out of the “I See My Light Shining: Baldwin-Emerson Elders Project.”

4 mins

 “I am under” by Amina Ross

In I am under the rock, Ross constructs a multisensory environment comprising reclaimed materials, video and experimental audio, all in dialogue with the architecture of the space, and particularly the arched windows. Extending their interest in “the underground” from their recent work Man’s Country, about a former, queer bathhouse, Ross’s project develops a realm for marginalized figures to exist and thrive in safety and to exercise agency. Negotiating vulnerability and resiliency, Ross draws connections with spirituality and subterranean networks in the natural world. Ross contemplates being a part of the land—“beneath the earth and made of earth”—rather than extracting from it or overlooking it.

Program Duration: 79 mins

Bios

Amina Ross is an artist, educator and lifelong learner who makes videos, sculptures, sounds, and situations. Their work has been recently exhibited at Someday (New York, NY), the Hessel Museum of Art (Hudson, NY), the Tang Teaching Museum (Saratoga Springs, NY) and Sentiment (Zurich, CH) among other venues. In the summer of 2023 they were a featured artist at the 68th annual Flaherty Film Seminar: Queer World Mending and in winter of 2024 they were a Macdowell Fellow. Currently, Ross is the 2023-2024 Estelle Lebowitz Artist in Residence at Douglass College, Rutgers University. They recently completed residencies at Fire Island Artist Residency, Lower East Side Printshop, Skowhegan School of Sculpture and Painting, Wave Hill, Abrons Art Center, and Harvestworks among others. They hold a BFA from School of the Art Institute of Chicago and an MFA from Yale School of Art, where they received the Fannie B. Pardee Prize in sculpture.

As an educator, Ross approaches the classroom as a site where they can co-create critical agency with students. They have taught at the Museum of Contemporary Art, Chicago,The School of the Art Institute of Chicago, Rhode Island School of Design, Parsons School of Design, The New School, and Vassar College.

Ross lives and works in Brooklyn, New York.

Sasha Wortzel uses video, installation, sculpture, sound, and performance to explore how this country’s past and present are inextricably linked through resonant spaces and their hauntings. Raised in South Florida (Miccosukee and Seminole lands) and based in New York City (Lenape lands), Wortzel specifically attends to sites and stories systematically erased or ignored from these regions’ histories. Tangled dynamics of desire and loss layered in the landscape and reverberating across time form a through-line in her work.

Wortzel’s films have screened at the Museum of Modern Art’s DocFortnight, CPH:DOX, True/False Film Festival, San Francisco International Film Festival, DOC NYC, BAMcinemaFest, New Orleans Film Festival, Wexner Center for the Arts, and Smithsonian American Art Museum, among others. Solo exhibitions include Dreams of Unknown Islands at Cooley Memorial Art Gallery with Portland Institute of Contemporary Art, Portland, OR (2022) .

Ohan Breiding works in photography, drawing, video, and collaboration to represent subjects that are marked deviant or illegible, and to experiment with forms of world-making that offer an alternative to state sanctioned legitimation. Breiding attended Scripps College, the Glasgow School of Art and received their Masters from CalArts.

They have exhibited work at art venues and museums including LAMAG (Los Angeles), Photo LA (Los Angeles), LAXART (Los Angeles), Human Resources (Los Angeles), Elga Wimmer Gallery (New York), the Armory Center for the Arts (Pasadena), Southern Exposure (San Francisco), the Berkeley Art Museum and Pacific Film Archive (Berkeley), the Yerba Buena Center for the Arts (San Francisco) and the Oakland Museum of California (Oakland). Breiding is a recipient of the 2017 Rema Hort Mann Emerging Artist Grant, and their work has been written about in Artforum, Hyperallergic, and Art in America amongst other publications. Originally from a small village in Switzerland, Ohan Breiding currently lives and works in Los Angeles, CA and Williamstown, MA where they are an Assistant Professor of Art and Art History at Williams College.

J. Wortham (they/them) is a sound healer,, reiki practitioner, herbalist, and community care worker oriented towards healing justice and liberation.

J is also a staff writer for The New York Times Magazine, and co-host of the podcast ‘Still Processing,’ They occasionally publish thoughts on culture, technology and wellness in a newsletter.

J is the proud editor of the visual anthology “Black Futures,” a 2020 Editor’s choice by The New York Times Book Review, along with Kimberly Drew, from One World. J is also currently working on a book about the body and dissociation for Penguin Press. J mostly lives and works on stolen Munsee Lenape land, now known as Brooklyn, New York, and is committed to decolonization as a way of life.

Suhaly Bautista-Carolina (she/they/we/us) joined the American LGBTQ+ Museum in February 2023. Prior to our museum, Suhaly acted as the Senior Managing Educator of Audience Development and Engagement in the Metropolitan Museum of Art’s education department. Additionally, Suhaly has held roles at the Caribbean Cultural Center African Diaspora Institute (CCCADI), Creative Time, and Brooklyn Museum and has worked in various capacities with organizations including The Laundromat Project, ArtBuilt, and ArtChangeUS. She has curated exhibitions and public programs in collaboration with Myrtle Avenue Brooklyn Partnership, Art Connects New York (ACNY), FOKUS, and NYC Salt and is one of 50 field leaders profiled in Jasmin Hernandez’ 2021 book, “We Are Here: Visionaries of Color Transforming the Art World.”

Her herbalism practice, as Moon Mother Apothecary, has been featured in The New York Times, Oprah Magazine, and People en Español among others. Suhaly has presented her work as an arts educator and community organizer at conferences around the world including MuseumNext, ArtPrize, Open Engagement, Culture Push, The New York City Arts in Education Roundtable, and POW Arts (Professional Organization of Women in the Arts). She is an executive board member of Weeksville Heritage Center in Brooklyn, NY, a national executive board member at ArtTable, and Catalyst Co-Chair of The Laundromat Project. She is also a founding member of the arts collective, present futures, a member of Black Women Artists for Black Lives Matter, and founder of BlackMagic Afrofuturism Book Club.

Suhaly was recently named a 2021 Women inPower Fellow with the 92Y Belfer Center for Innovation and Social Impact and is a member of the inaugural class of NYFA’s Incubator for Executive Leaders of Color. She earned her BA and MPA from New York University and lives in her native city of New York with her wife and their daughter, Luna.

Dr. Ksenia M. Soboleva is a New York based writer and art historian specializing in queer art and culture. She holds a PhD from the Institute of Fine Arts, NYU, with a dissertation on art, AIDS, and lesbian identity in the United States. Currently, she is working on a book project titled “Friendship as a Way of Art: Queer Identity and Visual Citation,” and co-editing the first monograph of the queer 1990s gallery Trial BALLOON (forthcoming with Karma). Soboleva is a regular contributor to the Brooklyn Rail and BOMB magazine, and her writings have appeared in various exhibition catalogues and artist monographs. She teaches at the New School and NYU.