Frankie Toan - "Queer Gardens: Over/Under"

Queer Gardens: Over/Under

This is the newest iteration of an ongoing installation series called Queer Gardens. In each edition of this series a fantasy garden is constructed out of remnants of past and ongoing projects, personal collections of highly specific detritus, and ubiquitous craft store materials- mostly reused and thrifted. In Queer Gardens: Over/Under I have begun to add in my collection of medical vial tops that I’ve collected over the years of HRT, and my partner and I’s process with IVF. I see all of these many materials, most of which could be categorized as trash, as the materials of world building. 

In Over/Under I have begun to steer away from some of the more representative imagery of past Queer Gardens installations. Instead, this piece leans further into the materiality of this fantasy world, embracing the tension between the overfamiliar, petroleum based materials, and natural imagery and concepts. This is an ever present tension for me. We build our world out of what’s at hand. Some of these materials, like the medical vial tops, which appear in the piece as clusters of multi-colored circles, are included because of the way the substances they represent allow me to literally build a way to navigate the larger world. Other materials, like the felt and fringe, rhinestones and glitter, are queer coded elements of costume and play.  As in nature, plants and animals grow next to, with, and on top of one another- creating ecosystems and networks of mutual dependance. Over/Under attempts to mimic the production of an ecosystem through the entanglement and transcendence of materials into something greater than the sum of their parts. As I engage in this process, I think on how the materials at hand can help us build more robust systems of care and community.