MICHAEL ESPINOZA

Sex with Ghosts

Install shot from "Sex with Ghosts" preview at Hide & Seek Gallery

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Sex with Ghosts is a group of photographic experiments using instant photography and photographic embroideries to explore communion with not-here lovers. Sex here means erotic attention, embodied solidarity, offerings to queer ancestors, and recognition of my own sexual mortality. By ghosts I mean memories, dreams, griefs, belief in my own future ghostness, and reveries of queer people, passed, real, imagined, and not-yet-here

In September of 2024, my partner Alex succumbed to suicide at the age of 34. This presentation is, and is not, about Alex’ death. Is: my grief is deep and this work is an attempt, a feeble, inefficient, pitiful attempt, to move through my specific and all-consuming grief. Is not: queer grief is the experience of attempting to survive despite living in a world which does not treat our existence as legible (we are ghosts). It has never been my intention to tell the story of Alex’ life or death through my work; indeed, it is his story to tell. I wish to present my grief, or these distortions of my grief, as a gift which may help us to learn how to survive.

Imagery in this body of work documents the appearance of ghosts. Ghosts appear as the waters of the body, and as bodies of water. Ghosts appear as reflections and shadows on living skin and dead skin. Ghosts appear as reflections and refractions through glass and on water. Ghosts appear as they consume flowers of condolence with decay. Ghosts appear on the sheets of empty beds after lovers have parted. Ghosts appear on the flat surfaces of over- and under-exposed Polaroids, gently reflecting distorted visions of ourselves. These ghosts are present in the quotidian and the extraordinary, throughout the unceasing advancement of queer time. These ghosts need our attention.

The combination of the instant and the slow has been my obsessive focus since I started working with embroidery and instant photography in 2022. In this body of work, I am experiencing a revelation about the meanings of this gesture: 1) memory creates distortions of time, 2) I exist in queer time (roughly defined as liberation from heteronormative constructs of time), and 3) I wish to make objects which complicate (queer) the experience of time. I am currently influenced by the idea that time exists on a continuum from the waters of the body to the deceptive eternality of oceans and rivers. “Sex with Ghosts” measures time this way: sex here is marking the spontaneous and ephemeral appearance of these waters, and ghosts are the accumulation of these waters throughout time, together.