In “‘Unnatural Acts’ in Nature—The Scientific Fascination with Queer Animals,” Jenifer Terry states that penetrative reproduction is the canonical account of evolution, while “non-reproductive behaviors” are framed as “dominance, submission, reciprocity, or competition within ecological hierarchies.” Typical ecology is thwarted—or at least critiqued—by varied sexual and gender expression. In queer ecology, supposed hiccups in flora and fauna relationships, such as non-reproductive sex and gender non-conforming behavior, aren’t perverted glitches in the matrix. They are studied, monumentalized, and celebrated. The recently opened exhibition Queer Ecologies at Purple Window Gallery forms a chosen family, an underground network of queer communications within a Midwestern biosphere.

To form Queer Ecologies curators Lily Erb and SK Reed gathered ten artists representing practices that span diverse ecological landscapes. Their work culls from the literal and abstract: the congested grasses of the prairie, the stuffiness of a log cabin, the sterile fluorescence of a grocery store, minuscule micro-universes made monumental, the mythical depths of the ocean, and all the fuzzy in-betweens.

Entering the gallery, artworks by Lily Erb, Linye Jiang, and Kellen Wright carve a paradoxically comforting and puncturing nook. Erb’s glistening velour microbe-creatures (Verrucomicrobium spinosum) rest astutely on the floor, with cozy quasi-rugs delineating them onto their own mock-plinths. Their layout resembles island cartography, while the delectably dilapidated forms evoke microbes invisibly scurrying. A shock of flamboyant pinks, yellows, and greens pulls the viewer to the right wall—monumental-scale fruits rendered as simulacra plastic signage. Jiang’s Banana from Fruit Portraits: Sweet, Juicy and Rebellious is a print adhered to acrylic, its fruit skin revealing scars. The works are sardonic, with Jiang’s artist statement exploring fruit as a slur, and the artworks expressing the artist’s “fetishes, rages, desires, and fears.” To the right, Wright’s boys to all but a learned few (after T. Fleischmann) is a bedsheet-turned-tapestry, strung from fishing lures from the artist’s father. It features a cyanotype MacBook screen cluttered with icons and windows, veiling a blown-up print of the artist’s handwritten journals—tender transcriptions speculating on the blurring of the digital with the private with the public with the familial (a homescreen versus a hometown).

To the left of the entrance, Eve Gordon’s SSR and Male Mallard (Anas platyrhynchos) in Winter is a pastel rendering of a mallard, its wood frame evoking log-cabin weekends stuffed with heirlooms. A mini-zine in front states that female mallards can undergo “Spontaneous Sex Reversal (SSR).” To its right, Justin Korver’s Reshooting: Filled is a framed mixed-media print that blockly declares, “FILLED WITH ALL THAT IS BETWEEN THEM,” depicting two hunters dragging a dead deer. Each grips an antler, the gesture metonymic of handholding, hinting at homoeroticism in hunting culture. The figures are also enmeshed in cross-stitch—a disguising maneuver. Across the gallery, Korver’s self-portraits depict the artist in seeming war paint, masculinity sluicing slightly into drag makeup. The curators note Korver was intimidated by the aggressive stare.

A monster lurks in the left corner, where David Nasca’s leather reconstruction of Tullimonstrum gregarium mythically juts out from the wall. Resembling taxidermy, the creature seems imagined, but the Tully monster was a real extinct animal from 300 million years ago. Blurring into science fiction, Nasca’s speculative fossil sculpture Tullimonstrum gregarium (holotype) rests below the leather sculpture.

SK Reed’s work spans two areas—the back wall, and then appears to yearn for its counterpart across the room. Delicate wood-fired clay sculptures radiate painted lines of clay salvaged from Kansas City’s earth. Their quasi-fresco surfaces reveal scars and bumps, alluding to future decay. They are nodules, striking familial connections like an adventitious root system, dismissing hierarchical thinking within queer communities. Exer Thurston’s cast glass sculptures, sprouting polyester ribbons, are scattered on podiums, living in an in-between space of creature, insect, pet, or toy. They are woefully begging for play. Kate Humphrey’s handwoven fiber pieces drape the walls as soft staccato poems, coyly acting as glitched flora and fauna depictions. The exhibition concludes with Naomi Hamlin-Navias’s Crossing, Reaching, a stitched waterfall of bioplastics fading from luminous indigos into sandpaper-like sheets pebbled with eggshells. A quilt, an heirloom, delves into the troubled legacy and enduring presence of plastics. 

Animate matter populates the Midwest, holding an alchemical space for gender-bending and sexual-adventuring. Even though political forces going back centuries trim the fringe of non-conforming ecological beings, residues and remnants remain for this exhibition’s queer artists to speculate, radicalize, and celebrate. The artworks together are a compost bin of queer longing for a respected place in a dilapidated, brittle ecological system. It is a sideways knowing and nodding, a perceptive crisscrossing of ecological genealogies both familiar and uncannily unknowable. The scientific zeitgeist views queer as either other or nonexistent. Actually, the queers have been here all along.