SHADOWTIDE

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SHADOWTIDE, Curated by UNDERTOW (founded by Nathan Storey)
September 6 – October 5, 2025

In SHADOWTIDE, queer artists turn to printed matter, photography, painting, and installation as sites of invention and resistance—ensuring queer lives are witnessed, recorded, and remembered. Across diverse practices, the artists gathered here work with fragments—archival traces, diaristic notations, erotic reprints, voice recordings, and ephemeral objects. In their hands, queer materials do not remain static; they are reactivated, reframed, and made into vessels for new futures.

Rory Fitzgerald Bledsoe transforms intimate voice memos into an interactive installation, staging acts of “consensual listening” that weave self-surveillance and performance into a sonic archive. Victor Castañeda-H remixes the lurid visual codes of 1990s queer nightlife—phone sex ads, rave flyers, and digital drawing tools—into SLEAZE LINE, a playful and defiant reclamation of queer eroticism shadowed by the AIDS epidemic.Nathan Storey works with queer printed matter and ephemera—letters, flyers, zines, and photographs—constructing assemblages that explore desire, memory, and loss. His practice merges archival research with personal collecting, reactivating fragments of queer print culture as sites of both intimacy and historical witness.

James Horner’s figurative abstractions reflect the intimate textures of LGBTQ+ life, drawing from environmental psychology to reveal queer spaces of connection and vulnerability. rae richards probes the porous borders of the body in their proto.trans series, where circuits, flesh, and queer time overlap to form new techno-organic embodiments. Blake Ballard mobilizes craft, performance, and collaboration to question tradition and expand queer communal narratives. His work issues a clear warning—YIELD TO THEIR POWER AT YOUR OWN PERIL—insisting on the urgency of supporting community, queer, and BIPOC artists in resistance to corporate power and cultural erasure. Alex Blom synthesizes queer spirituality, erotic embodiment, and the histories of homoerotic print culture into a practice of sacred queer devotion, exploring how erotic image-making becomes ritual and inheritance.

Rooted in the American West, Alexander Richard Wilson paints the contradictions of land and habitation, drawing on the history of the Front Range and observations of social crossover experienced as a Black queer American artist. beck haberstroh turns to the Texas A&M Don Kelly Research Collection, translating queer handwriting into sweat prints that fuse performance, labor, and photography into queer archival endurance.

In gathering these fragments, SHADOWTIDE does not aim for a fixed or complete narrative. Instead, it dwells in the shadows, tides, and margins—those fleeting gestures that have always carried queer life forward. —Nathan Storey UNDERTOW Founder & Director