“I make objects out of metal that express elusive feelings of alienation tied to my Black, American, and queer identities. Influenced by West African design, I integrate and reinterpret traditional designs to create my own visual language that reflects my experience living in the diaspora. My work explores themes of queerness, belonging, kinship, dis/connection, and cultural (il)legibility at the intersections of race, gender, and sexuality. Black and queer futurity are cornerstones of my design practice as I pull from ancestral and contemporary influences to both reclaim my cultural lineage and imagine new possibilities for self-definition and collective liberation.”
Naomi Johnson
(they/she)
S Sanchez
they/them
Juror’s Choice
Our jurors for [queerphoria] vol. 5: flourish each chose an artist’s work that they wanted to highlight from the exhibition.
“Imagine 2,000 years from now, in a time when the people have returned to living with the land, S Sanchez’s Double €aguar Rattle is unearthed by our queer progeny after undergoing a process of chemical transformation for millennia. As they carefully brush away the soil and eye the piece with curiosity, as they look into €aguar’s eyes and a deep sense of safety washes over them.
S Sanchez’s piece is fundamentally about time: nonlinear, layered, and alive. Drawing from ancestral symbols while projecting forward, Double €aguar Rattle functions as evidence—proof of existence across eras. To make an artifact, as Sanchez has done, is not only to imagine the future, but to actively shape it. For queer and trans people of color, whose lives are so often rendered precarious or erased, this is a radical act.
The €aguar presents as a powerful representation of queerness and transness—protector, witness, and communicator across temporal boundaries. A noise maker, the rattle speaks in a time when queer voices are continually threatened with silence; its sound insists on presence. The jaguar, a symbol of strength and guardianship, holds space across past, present, and future, asserting: we have always been here, and we will always be here.
Sanchez’s work collapses time, reaching backward and forward simultaneously, pulling the viewer into a continuum where ancestry and futurity coexist.”
-Naomi
