Kelsey Sucena: Paralytic States (2023)
05.05.2023 – 05.31.2023
BICA School Project Space
Opening Reception: Friday, May 5th, 2023, 5-9pm, Reading @8:30pm
BICA School is pleased to present Paralytic States (2023), the first solo exhibition by artist and educator Kelsey Sucena, in the BICA School Project Space, curated by Nando Alvarez-Perez. Kelsey Sucena (she/they) is a trans* photographer, writer, editor, and former Park Ranger working at the intersection of photography and text. Her work is centered on the United States as a site for post-capitalist, queer, and critical reflection. Situating her own trans*feminine identity in negotiation with America’s physical, political, historical, and cultural landscapes, her practice documents her personal struggle with self-identification through periods of political upheaval.
First published as an experimental small-run postal exhibition in 2020, Paralytic States (2020) acted as a timely and intimate response to the presidential election cycle. It received attention as an honorable mention in the 2020 Essay Press book contest and as a finalist for the Lucie Foundation Photobook Prize in 2021. Here, Paralytic States is reconfigured and re-presented for the first time for public exhibition.
Paralytic States straddles the space between memoir and manifesto, utilizing a queer/closeted epistemology to consider questions of community, country, and identity. Taken together, the photographs and essays work in concert to produce an intertextual dialogue that is both intimate and political, riffing off of the long history of road trip photography and trans* memoir in order to complicate both genres. What emerges from that conversation is an uncertain document of the last few years.
Printed onto the surface of flags, this iteration of Paralytic States combines a selection of images with text in a kind of alternative publication. In conversation with both Pride and Gadsden flags, the dramatic composition captures the odd intersection of identity and ideology that flags are so often deployed to convey. Activated through a performative slideshow, the result is both political in scale, and personal in effect.
Beyond her practice, Kelsey is also a Visiting Assistant Professor of Photography at Alfred University, Managing Editor of Photocaptionist, and a freelance writer/editor with various contributions to 10x10 Photobooks, Float Photo Magazine, Rocket Science, Aperture, Fifth Wheel Press, Strange Fire Collective, Humble Arts Foundation, From Here On Out, and Queer.Archive.Work. She is also a former Visual Information Specialist with the National Park Service on Fire Island. She received her MFA from Image Text Ithaca in 2020. Kelsey recently accepted a tenure track position as an Assistant Professor of Photography at Alfred University.
