KATE WARREN | Stormdoor (Lucille), 2022

"What are the words you do not yet have? What do you need to say? What are the tyrannies you swallow day by day and attempt to make your own, until you will sicken and die of them, still in silence?" – Audre Lorde, The Transformation of Silence into Language and Action (1977)         

A tragic accident in 1970 resulted in the death of my father's young sisters and father, creating a wound that rippled across generations. Family rarely spoke of the loss and forbade access to the albums and ephemera that detailed their lives before the accident, an idyllic mid-century family torn apart by loss. Nine months after moving home to Vermont to care for my mother during the 2020 pandemic, I convinced my family to share the archive with me. I discovered my late grandfather’s lifelong photographic work, which sparked a subversive call and response with my own. Fifty years and two generations later, his domestic images of doting fatherhood contrast with my own queer gaze.  The Slit counteracts the dehumanizing effects of growing up raised in the dual closets of emotional and queer repression within a conservative Catholic family. Staged photographs, installations, and quilt sculptures operate as tools of remembrance and resistance, subverting family mythologies within a queer register. I perform as close and distant kin, both male and female, living and dead. Precise use of period details allows the images to oscillate between the vernacular and cinematic, shifting family mythologies to create space for the emergence of queer feminist futures.  

My photographs appropriate the aesthetics of "traditional family values” by making visible gender fluid alternatives. What does it mean to be the "man of the house" as a non-binary dyke? My portrayals of female masculinity offset harm caused by restrictive norms, offering soft butchness as an antidote to emotionally restrictive masculinities. I blur the line between fact and fiction as time seems to fold in on itself across generations. Queer culture celebrates self-identification, an essential component of finding meaningful identity as a member of a marginalized community. By processing my father's intergenerational grief through the rituals of picture-making, I attempt to create queer histories I can call my own. 

BIO

Kate Warren (b. 1988) is a queer artist and educator based in Hudson, NY. She explores intimacy, memory, and grief through photography, archival interventions, and quilt works that re-examine established histories and exhume hidden pasts. Her work uses shared vulnerability as a catalyst for connection, bridging taboos that include sex, spirituality, and loss. Raised in the mountains of Vermont, she finds that connection to community, the land, and rural romanticism underpin her work. She holds an MFA from Syracuse University, and has exhibited at the California Museum of Photography, Light Work, University of Iowa, and Washington Project for the Arts.