Скачать или смотреть In the studio with Samuel Jayms Case, Low-Res MFA in Visual Studies candidate at PNCA.

@samueljaymscase creates through mixed media, painting, and writing “As a queer man, I’ve been looking for hope this last year. I want to know where it lives, how it’s propagated and spread. I need some more hope, and conversations with my friends and family in the community makes me think I’m not alone in that need.

‘Love Letter’ is about my quest for hope. Using lace as a metaphor for protection and vulnerability, I’ve copied and translated and recreated a lace pattern again and again using commercially accessible materials- plastic, vinyl, markers, and plywood.

Each piece is a letter to a different person. Some people give me hope: some I’m hoping to encourage. Letters to loved ones, strangers, and deities are interwoven with reproductions of lace in an exploration of how hope and longing are communicated.

While hope is a forward-looking emotion, I looked to the past to start my search. Queer bodies and narratives have often been obscured or erased, yet lace—full of holes and absence—offers a radical visibility.

I find potential in that negative space. I lace together longing and lineage, vulnerability and joy, to create work that celebrates the fluid, the unspoken, the surviving.

What I’ve found in my search is this: hope lives in the intersection between joy and fear. It’s in the stories and messages we tell each other, and the ways in which we whisper our most gentle wishes in the dark.

At the heart of this work is the understanding that hope is an action; a call to arms. “✨ See their work at the PNCA Low-Res MFA Thesis Exhibition — opening June 27th, 6 PM.