As relieved as I am that pride month is over (it’s just. so. busy.), I spent some time revisiting a conversation I had with my friend SK Reed about this exhibition they curated called Queer Ecologies. It took place earlier this year at Purple Window Gallery in Chicago, IL. Featured artists: Lily Erb, Eve Gordon, Naomi Hamlin-Navias, Kate Humphrey, Linye Jiang, Justin Korver, David Nasca, SK Reed, Exer Thurston, and Kellen Wright. All documentation by Amy Shelton Photography.

SK Reed is a driven, multi-faceted artist based in Kansas City, MO. In 2022 they became a curator for Beco Gallery, a 25-year artist-run space that doubled as a flower shop. Shortly after taking over, Beco lost its space in the heart of the Crossroads Arts District and eventually transformed into The Waiting Room, which is now located in the Holsum Building in the West Bottoms, KC — a particularly saturated area of artists on the outskirts of the the city. Having filled out an entire calendar of exhibitions through an open call with Beco Gallery, upon the closure of the space new venues were sought out to execute their ideas. Also in 2022, SK happened to attend Midway (MDW), an annual convening of artist-run spaces across the midwest that is put on by slightly larger art institutions. This is where the story begins for Queer Ecologies:

SK: Midway was my first stab at curatorial project on behalf of Beco Gallery. I selected three artists…and I drove their work from Kansas City to Chicago. Long story short, I met the folks from Purple Window Gallery in their booth, and it was one of my favorite shows there.

They didn’t talk that much to the owner of Purple Window at the time of the bustling event, just a slight connection was established. A year later, in Chicago for a different event, SK visited Purple Window Gallery in their actual space. A mere mention of their admiration for the space’s curation at MDW paired with an interested inquiry to collaborate instantly led to the coordination of an exchange show between Purple Window Gallery and The Waiting Room Gallery.

JM: Wow. That is a real testament to the kind of connection Artist-Run spaces have to each other, especially in the Midwest. There is persistence it takes to create these connections, yet the smallest gestures can create major opportunities.

Installation view of *Queer Ecologies* at Purple Window Gallery.

Originally, Queer Ecologies was to be a duo show between SK and artist and curator Lily Erb; the two nonbinary artists are making sculptures about how species exist in the world beyond humans’ social spheres. They decided they wanted to invite others through an open call in an effort to expand on their vision of Queer Ecologies, gaining eight more makers.

As SK navigates me through a virtual slideshow of the space, I begin to make observances and ask questions.

JM: You've created quite a scene here that definitely feels like it's underwater or other worldly; it exists in a space full of life, but it's not human life. If you have a story about the installation, or the curating of the work you want to begin with, that would be great to hear.

SK: We originally were hoping to add just six additional artists…but there were so many incredible artists in the open call it really felt like the show was [becoming] more about the diversity of voices. When you think of ecology, it's honestly, literally anything. Humans are ecology, everything living on Earth is ecology, so, [the question became] how do we wanna guide this this conversation with these, now ten, artists?

*Tullimonstrum gregarium (reconstruction)*, 2025, **David Nasca**, 56” x 10” x 16”, Leather.

Our virtual tour became a guide on science meeting art meeting gender studies. They first introduce me to David Nasca’s work.

SK: He's interested in the Tully monster, which is I guess the Illinois State fossil.

The Tullimonstrum gregarium, an extinct soft-bodied creature whose incredibly detailed fossils, despite the creature’s softness, are commonly and exclusively found in the region of NE Illinois; a representation of its tropical past hundreds of millions of years ago.

JM: Reading the statements, when I saw that investigation of Nasca’s I just thought…who would have known? I was not even aware states have designated state fossils.

SK: Right?…He was really interested in the lore behind this fossil because there's only so much that you can know about this species. There are all of these crazy 3D renderings that imagine what it would look like if it were alive today, um, and it's truly bizarre. In his research, he talks about how it's so different from any other creature that is living in the world now, or even at that time. And he's also interested in these fossils as having similarities with queerness and queer archives... There are questions about preservation, what gets saved, how much we can know…Also it's just a really funny, interesting creature worth crystallizing.

We look at some similarly underwater soft-bodied-looking creatures curated nearby, made by Exer Thurston.

*Red,* 2024, **Exer Thurston**, 7 x 5 x 6 in, Hot cast glass, polyester ribbon, tape.

SK: All three pedestal pieces in the exhibit are by Exer Thurston, who works with cast glass and then fiber. I think you can see the fiber clearly in the image, but there's cast glass in all of these, which really is so beautiful in person. In their work, they talk a lot about the unnamed/name-ability (if that's a word) of “weirdness.” There is an illegibility to these, categorized as being “something,” just not something we know or recognize. Those works really sit in a space of the very abstract, but are playful, and beautiful.

I thought about what they said about “illegibility” and equated it immediately in my mind to being queer, or to being “othered” for other reasons. It is a challenging word. Yet, here it represents a mystery that takes on such a cool and unusual form. I want to touch it.

JM: There is something really specific to the art as it relates to the identity of the artist that the viewer might be unable to fully get a sense of…I think what is really drawing me to this show is the vastness of material used here as well, which heightens a sense of the unknown. Considering this, what kind of conversations were happening when placing the work, besides the narratives of queerness in ecology?

SK: I think there are a lot of conversations about locality here. Personally, you know, I think a lot about my own work…

They point out the clay-fired pieces on the wall, beaming golden rays expanding outwards from the centers, painted on the wall with clay sourced from the prairies of Kansas City. This detail is evidenced by the gentle cracking taking place within the beams.

*for the beatles and bees (Grey Headed Coneflower),* 2024, **SK Reed**, 15 x 13 x 3 in, Wood Fired Ceramic using Missouri Clay, Foraged Kansas City Clay Painted on Wall.

SK: I think about how overwhelming the political sphere can be sometimes. Even in my human relationships…there's no way to fully know someone—especially when you're, like, between a gender; especially in the Midwest, performing a gender in a way that someone wants you to. I think there's a lot of relief when you go out into these [places] and get outside of the human lens. A lot of the artists are looking to other non-human species. So I ask, what does that practice look like in the Midwest?

They prompt us to investigate Kate Humphrey’s piece.

*A Poem to My Last Self*, 2022, **Kate Humphrey**, 27 in x 33 in, Handwoven on TC-2 with cotton and wool.

SK: What's really encapsulating about Kate's work is that they are thinking about larger swaths of time and being from multiple locations…[she is] thinking about the prairie, but also thinking about the ocean. We talked about how this whole area [around modern day Chicago] used to be, you know, fully underwater….I think there's so many lessons you can glean from all of these other species [that have adapted or migrated here over time].

JM: Something kind of clicked in my head of the slipperiness of the landscape physically, especially considering how time affects it…the ephemeral is really showing here in this work, and yours.

SK has this motif I have seen in their work since their graduate program at KU, those angular beams of color that start at the center of a space on the floor or a central part of a work on the wall, radiating outwards. Typically this design has been made of vinyl and adhered to the wall. This exhibition prompted SK to think more about waste. Plus, spending exorbitant amount of time in certain prairie lands, the quietness of such locations urged SK to think about the survival of species unseen, the clay a symbol of their ability to thrive; a symbol the cyclicality of stuff that lasts a short time. I imagine it provides an earthy smell if you get up close to it.

Naomi Hamlin-Navias’ work is a piece adjacent to SK’s that more directly touches that idea of waste in the environment.

JM: This work is definitely giving the energy of a calm ocean shore, an aerial view of water coming over the shore. I am curious what the materials are here. They are representative of plastic, yet I don’t think it is, right?

*Crossing, Reaching,* 2024, **Naomi Hamlin-Navias**, 40 x110 in, Agar based bioplastic, indigo dye, eggshells, tea leaves, chlorophyll, cotton

SK: Right, they use bioplastics, and, um, to be honest I don’t fully know that process, except that is it a seaweed or agar-based plastic. So, it is made from natural materials that can return to the Earth…The material of this piece really pulls me in, and then strangely a lot of the pieces in the show had these blues and browns that are a play on the ocean as well as a play on the land.

On the floor rests Lily Erb’s soft sculptures.

SK: These are models of soil microbes…[Lily] uses fiber in a lot of their work [to make] soft sculptures. They're super inviting in person.

Apparently, Lily does not mind if you touch them. Unfortunately, with no signage there was a hesitancy to engage with these weirdly adorable plushies.

Soil microbes are these microscopic forms that are, like, really important to the soil health. [Lily] increased the scale; how many times exactly I don't know, but it is a lot. Now they're larger than life and taking up presence. Giving space to what you don't even notice helps construct and create [an understanding] of the world around you. I think Lily has a lot of sci-fi interests in their work, and so they do feel like these almost like little like monsters or something, too.

On the wall behind Erb’s work is Linye Jiang’s fruits.

SK: Linye is a Chinese artist based in Chicago. Her fruit series [called Sweet, Juicy and Rebellious] actually talk about a kind of drag. It is explained by the artist they are interested in these fruits that you can find at a lot of grocery stores, but are often also found in China, and the fruits don't always have the same flavor…they have this kind of strangeness of being something…that has traversed or traveled a far far distance, not as flavorful as they initially would have been in their original location.

SK explains the process of Linye’s work as taking the photographs of the fruit, printing on semi-transparent sheets, laser cutting the bright pink acrylic sheet backing, and adding a final layer of resin layered with bedazzlement of sparkles to “put them into drag.” Their natural beauty is simply emphasized. Linye mentions there is a word in Mandarin that translates to “sissy’,” a derogatory word for gay men in China, which is similar to the Western term popularized between the 60’s-80’s to describe gay men: “fruit.” As a queer woman, Linye projects her “fetishes, rages, desires, and fears onto [the fruit], imbuing it with new meaning to reflect the intricacies of queer life.”

*boys to all but a learned few (after T. Fleischmann) (iteration 2),* 2024, **Kellen Wright**, 43.5” (H) x 72” (W) x 12” (D), cyanotype on a bedsheet, digital collage printed on PSV, my father’s fishing lures, grommets, fishing line; *38.8094579, -90.5383727) (39.158423, -94.760208),* 2025, **Kellen Wright & SK Reed**, Pinch pot by David Lieffring, local Kansas City clay sourced by SK, charcoal made by Kellen from invasive honeysuckle and cucumber vine.

Next to Linye’s work and across from Naomi’s quilted ocean shore tapestry, is a similarly blue, gridded, rippling piece by Kellen Wright, a cyanotype of the artist’s desktop screen. Two images are pulled up on the desktop: one of a tall, elegantly slender human in heels swinging a small purse on a football field, the other a large indiscernible object, perhaps a tree trunk or boulder, in a forest scene, both are fiercly taking up space. Handwritten diaristic writing was scrawled on the wall behind it, obscured in general from the viewer’s vision — I am uncertain of its importance at this virtual distance. As a throughline of performance begins to emerge in this narrative of Midwestern queer artists/ecologists, I direct my attention to the two black and white prints.

The prints are titled hide/see, captured by Justin Korver. Putting on makeup like a form of drag, in an effort to question the performance of masculinity through the popularly Midwestern and male-dominated sport of hunting, he takes these striking photos amidst the trees.

SK: Is he blending in? Is he standing out? In one photo his eyes are closed, in the other one they're wide open. The wide open one is actually, um, I don't know how to describe it other than… slightly scary. There's this power that is acknowledged as a man in the world…an underlying dominance, right? He describes that even looking at his own image, [there is a] fear that is instilled within himself.

*Queer Ecologies* from left to right: *SSR and Male Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) in Winter,* 2025, **Eve Gordon**, 11 x 14 in, Oil Pastel on Paper; *Nature is Queer*, Zine, 2024, **Eve Gordon**, 2.75 x 4.25 in, Printer Ink on Paper; *Reshooting: Filled*, 2023, **Justin Korver**, Pearled cotton and archival pigment print on paper, 21” x 27”

SK: He talks about this like very inert eroticism that's mixed with hunting culture. He says a lot of dudes don't know how to, maybe, interact in other ways so they go into these really extreme kind of hobbies, I guess.

To not lean into the stereotypes derived from the social constructs of masculinity too much, I think of the ways in which we as humans interfere with nature after talking about Justin’s work. There is hunting for population control, for subsistence, for other ethical reasons, and there is also abusiveness of that power and the ability to wield a gun. A sense of control historically expressed in a patriarchal sense, a habit destructive to nature—that includes humans.

A quite different vibe of illustrative art is curated adjacent to Justin’s work.

SK: Eve Gordon is a scientific illustrator…we were really excited when we saw this in the open call because it just brought the scientific study of other species [directly] into the show. Nature is Queer and is the title of the zine, and in it is all of these little drawings of other species that are queer in some kind of way, whether that's the way that they're performing their sexuality or their shifting genders….nature is queer in so many ways, but science is intentionally hidden such an interpretation.

There are beyond many instances where the natural world expresses sexuality and gender in opposition to the ideology of the binary many parts of our society cling to. “Gender norms” as they apply to humans are not so “normal” in the presence of the scientific evidence underpinning the works of this exhibition. I am not aiming to anthropomorphize the various species that experience something humans consciously know as transness, yet there is still quite a fascinating relationship between a human’s understanding of being transgender and the spontaneous and biologically natural occurrences of sex changes in animals.

The Mallard duck (pictured in a drawing by Eve) is one species that, when unable to produce female hormones, transitions to male naturally, even able to produce sperm in most cases. This is due to the female duck only producing one functional ovary of two; one is producing male hormones. If the functional ovary stops functioning due to disease, viola! You will begin to see a male presenting Mallard. A natural occurrence in nature.

There is an opportunity for pushback from believers of the binary to say that the comparisons cannot be drawn between nature and humans, however, humans are a part of the natural world. The depth of our consciousness measured to be quite complex in comparison to other species, sure, but sex and gender studies reveal the fluidity of our biological makeup, too. There are many species considered Intersex, yet the community of humans who are Intersex remain the most erased in LGBTQIA+ history.

The stuff that makes us up is complex; numbers and letters symbolizing chemicals and matter that can’t realistically be controlled by such societal constructs. We are all transitory here on Earth, learning from nature and its inevitable fluidity. May this exhibition and this conversation with SK provide a curiosity for the resistant to lean in a bit to that flow, and learn from the unseen.

And touch some grass today.

Thank you to SK for all the time they gave to this conversation and investigation of the natural world we are embedded in. Follow their work, here!

Queer Ecologies

For the Sake of Keeping