Dogwood Messer: In Intervals Between Reach and Grasp
Dogwood Messer, The Raft of Medusa, 2025, 40 × 60”, Archival pigment print on smooth rag paper
OPENING RECEPTION: Friday, March 6th, 2025 from 6-9 PM, EST
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We're pleased to announce In Intervals Between Reach and Grasp, a solo presentation by Dogwood Messer.
Messer (b. 1995) uses found images to mark and expand an ecoqueer archive. Collages of these images become large chromogenic prints, which he cuts, tears, and rip open.Queer subjects step through those openings, their limbs spilling out of the original plane of the collage. Through this interplay between bodies and printed images, present and historical, Messer works to continue and revise conversations around conceptions of beauty and community.
The concept of queer time animates Messer’s relationship to archival material. According to theorist José Esteban Muñoz, queerness does not exist in time as a pre-existent form, like found images, but “as an ideality that can be distilled from the past and used to imagine a future.” Taped, torn, and photoshopped, queer bodies meet in his images along the contours of chests sloping toward hips, thighs, and intersecting limbs. Following these lines, new Frankenstein figures form, occupying neither past nor present, but a space of ideality, full of future possibilities bodies might take in relation to each other.
Using a mix of mirrors, rephotographing and Photoshop, Messer places himself in the images and in relationship to the transhistorical queer community those images work to index. The personal appears not just in the form of his own figure, but through his
personal archive. After Hurricane Katrina swept over Messer’s home, his family documented all damages with a disposable camera, constructing an archive for insurance claims. Messer collages and rephotographs those visual records, forming a new record that shows what potential can be salvaged from ruin. Confronting the challenges of representing something as immense as climate disaster, Messer brings together, in the single flattened plane of a photograph, multiple perspectives, making room for portraits of people whose homes flooded, the water-logged materials of those homes, and satellite maps of hurricanes.
As Messer compresses perspective, he creates a space to embody the anxiety of living with climate precocity, marking the places where weather meets skin, opening opportunities to inhabit vulnerability. In Messer’s images, he works not so much to represent queer bodies or the storms they are caught in, as to mark potential processes of becoming. The subjects define themselves through materiality: shifting, stretching, and taking space in and beyond the picture plane and through tears and collages of prints. The shapes these subjects take expand the surface area of figures, increasing points of contact between bodies and environments until it becomes difficult to differentiate one from another. The final collaged compositions conceptualize queerness and ecology in a way that shows the body not as one thing, but at the center of histories, landscapes, and many other bodies, none of them stable, all transforming together, multiplying surface area, points of contact, and the possibilities of what they could become.
Dogwood Messer (b. 1995) grew up in Mississippi in a Gulf Coast community flooded by Hurricane Katrina. After Katrina, his family documented all damages with a disposable camera. His art practice began by drawing from those records not to catalog damages but to form his own record of what potential might be salvaged from disaster. Art has been his means for understanding the world, even wrecked and uprooted, and imagining new possibilities within it. His practice has brought him far from the Deep South to study at Williams College, to attend residencies at Storm King and Wassaic Project, and to exhibit across the Northeast and at art fairs like Spring/Break LA and Arrival.
For all media inquiries, please email anna@wolfganggallery.com.
