Zoe Walsh’s residency was focused mostly on the pre-production phase. They spent their time reading CAConrad’s ECODEVIANCE. A series of rituals and poems—such as pollinating flowers for security cameras—the poems are “about disrupting the factory within oneself,” Walsh says. Pulling elements from archival photographs and staging their own, Walsh creates radiant and monumental works containing silhouetted figures amongst polychromatic landscapes. The paintings are models of what Walsh calls trans-visual pleasure. “I wanted to make paintings that have a type of optimism in them,” Walsh says. 

One of the sources is Pat Rocco, a filmmaker and activist who lived in Los Angeles and documented the first Pride Parade. Rocco also shot erotic films in public spaces throughout the city, where Walsh is based. Rendering the figures from these films as silhouettes, and photographing their friends as well, Walsh is interested in gender expressions that move beyond the body. “It’s a way to get out of having to talk about gender through body parts, which is a demand that was placed heavily on my work in grad school,” Walsh says. “It’s getting away from this idea that you can understand something about people based on their appearance.”

The works themselves are labor intensive. “The first layers of the paintings are screen printed with acrylic paint, then they’re stenciled, then I use squeegees and spatulas to pull these thick gels of acrylic across,” Walsh says. The larger paintings can include fifty prints, and the results are psychedelically flavored, a mix of representational and abstract. “One of the places my work comes from is the experience of going to see a movie as a kid and identifying with a character on-screen,” they say. “That fantasy space, that imaginary space, can give you an alternative lens to understand yourself and to feel yourself.”