Join us First Friday November 7th for our 🚨 last opening of the year! We are thrilled to host the opening reception of the exhibition Queer as Water by Kenzie Wells.

During this event, we will be hosting our Open Artist Studios with all our Relay Ridge Resident Artists
✨PLUS✨
we will be hosting a pop-up outdoor exhibition of the 2025 Steamroller BIG Prints made during Knox Small Press Fest @knoxsmallpressfest with a few woodblocks on display in the printshop.

QUEER AS WATER

My mixed-media practice explores sites of environmental and queer resilience that overturn
heteronormative social structures. Industrial items such as gates and tires are sculpted into
conglomerations coated in residues of resin. Found trinkets are fossilized into surfaces, some forming
sarcastic, queer-coded messages. These assemblages subvert capitalistic norms that perpetuate
ecological demise, commenting on how political forces inhibiting LGBTQIA+ rights coincide with
societal shifts toward ecocide.

In Long Live Queer Night Life, Amin Ghaziani outlines underground queer night clubs as utopias where
social structures are reversed: queer folks are in charge. My work engages with the material aesthetics
found in these scenes, exploring the fluidity of nighttime spaces where colored lights illuminate
glittery surfaces as day shifts to night.

In my recent series Queer as Water, I explore the queer potential of the beach, referencing it as a
space suspended outside social hierarchies, drawing on Hannah Freed-Thall’s Modernism at the
Beach. Beach ecologies embody specific textural decay, visualized through crumbling cement, pitted
surfaces, and pearlescent growths similar to lichen and barnacles.

Through improvisation, my work engages with the resistant spirit of beaching, wherein queer folks
gather in industrial settings. My sculptures tell stories of our watery, material future through a lens
that portrays water as a mystical, queer force. Through decay and transformation, my work reflects
the playful tenacity embodied by queer communities alongside resistant ecologies.

__________

Kenzie Wells (they/them) is a mixed-media sculptor, fabricator, and educator currently based in
Washington, D.C. They are a lover of all animals, co-parenting 5 pets with their partner, and has a
robust collection of little-things-found-on-the-ground. Wells has attended the Wassaic Project Artist
Residency, Oxbow School of Art and Artists’ Residency, and Penland School of Craft. They have
exhibited nationally in galleries, including: SPRING/BREAK Art Show, New York, MoCA Tucson, The
University of Arizona Museum of Art, and Charlotte Street Foundation, Kansas City, MO. Originally
from Knoxville, TN, Wells received their BFA in 2015 from the University of Tennessee, and MFA in
2020 from the University of Arizona.