MYIASIS

Referencing the Latin root monstrare, meaning “to warn” or “to advise,” this series of photographs positions monstrosity not as horror but as a signal - something that attracts like a lighthouse, unsettles, and teaches.

The images featured show a solitary figure wearing a beekeeper’s helmet, their body encumbered by flies grasping a luminous orb - a fly trap. Exploring the intersection between attraction and repulsion, the flies are drawn to the light, which mirrors the viewers gaze on the images themselves. The reflective industrial surface of the metal the photographs are printed upon both repels and reflects the tension between beauty and disgust.

The flies circling the figure echo Leo Bersani’s idea of queer desire as “self-shattering” - their attraction to the light embodying a sort of destructive absolution wholly existing in queerness.

These images extend the concept of the monstrous beyond the grotesque, embracing it as a layered expression of queer transformation… illuminating and reclaiming the monster.