The artist’s latest exhibition at the Leslie-Lohman Museum draws parallels between queerness and the interconnectedness of our planet.
Trees are a witness to evolution. The etchings of history can be seen in each ring carved into a stump, each fiber woven into a leaf, and each root extended below the ground. Therefore, a natural synchronicity exists between the forests they inhabit and human history. Trees protect and observe the formation of our identities, our suffering and grief, and our subsequent resilience and resistance. They are silent voyeurs of humanity, a concept that artist Andrea Geyer examines in her latest body of work.
Geyer’s work “The Promise of Lightning,” on display at the Leslie Roman Museum in Soho until January 12, engages queer history in relational dialogue with the natural world. Through a series of silkscreens, video installations, newspapers, banners, and wall-splashed photographs, Geyer explores the hegemonic culture that maintains systems of power, and explores how both the forest and the LGBTQIA+ community are part of contemporary political fluidity. It exemplifies the generational wisdom that can be imparted to methods.
Upon approaching the museum, visitors are greeted by a manifesto. The manifesto is a series of white banners hung in gallery windows that Geyer installed during previous exhibitions in Berlin and Pittsburgh. Shining silver fabric has inscriptions such as “When other museums are destroyed in war, we want museums to feel their floors tremble” and “Museums are places where the truth cannot escape us.” It has phrases like “request” sewn into it, so you can do it right away. Geyer says viewers reconceptualize museums from commercialized institutions to “places of possibility where we can continually reimagine not only ourselves but each other.”
Installation view of Andrea Geyer / Promise
lightning. Photography by object study. © 2024
Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art, New York.
Within the exhibition itself, Geyer will display two new works showcasing Germany’s Black Forest: Lightning and The Rotating Promise of Breath. The image of a dense forest, located just 30 minutes from where she grew up, evokes not only the formation of Geyer’s queer identity, but also the inseparability between environmental and political structures. “I realized I was gay in the woods before I was gay in the world,” Geyer says.
Like the promise of lightning, images of trees are delicately layered and screen printed in rainbow colored inks on several sheets of quilted silkscreen. Light refracts off the ink depending on where the viewer stands within the gallery, evoking the often vague and invisible frameworks that shape our conscious reality and self. Fragments of poems Geyer wrote after researching LGBTQIA+ community organizations (“Lover of the Reaching Star,” “The Unheard Being,” “The Deviant”) are embroidered onto the silkscreen itself. In Breathturns, videos of specific trees within the forest are displayed on multiple flat screen TVs on the gallery floor, further considering the hidden history shared by both collective memory and ecosystems. The combination of silence and grayscale, like a gentle wind swaying through the trees, gives the recording a tone of nostalgia and solemnity.
The sophistication of the medium in both works was a deliberate artistic choice by Geyer. “We realized that to preserve the integrity of the forest, we needed to rethink the photos and videos we recorded,” she continues. “I have developed a form of expression that allows it to remain tangible, the many layers in which it exists.The work shows and performs queer collectivity not only visually but also concretely. .”
Andrea Geyer, The Promise of Lightning (We Will Find Ourselves), 2024. Courtesy of Artist and Hales London/New York
Interspersed throughout the exhibition are photographs documenting the history of advocacy, protest, and organizing in the queer community that Geyer obtained from the Leslie Roman Museum’s photographic archives. Still images of activity, love, empowerment, and strength emphasize the message of intergenerational perseverance that the Black Forest imagery carries. Further reinforcing this concept is a newspaper publication and online database titled The Future Is Now: An Impossible Archive Of Queer Advocacy And Resistance. This database tracks over 1000 historical and contemporary LGBTQIA+ organizations and allows viewers to take home a physical copy.
“What this work has in common with all my other work is that the so-called ‘undervalued’ is often always already present and actively shaping the reality in which we live. We’re doing a good job of making it happen,” Geyer concluded. “My hope is to open up a space for viewers to understand themselves in relation to each other and to these larger histories planned as part of the exhibition.”
