In this interview with Kyle Agnew we learn the parallels between the Indiana Dunes, the phenomenon of Magenta as a color, and capturing joyfulness with Kyle’s queer identity and analog photographic practice. In this dialogue exchange, we discuss their project, Our Cheeks Blushed Amidst Prairie Grasses.
Kyle Agnew’s work is on view through March 30, 2025 as part of Griffin Museum’s online exhibitions programming, Family Matters, focusing on LGBTQIA+ photographers from, alongside the works of Jorge Ariel Escobar, Stas Ginzburg, and Caleb Cole.
Kyle Agnew is an Indiana native and received his BFA in photography from the University of Indianapolis in Indianapolis, Indiana. Kyle’s practice is a colorful, sentimental, cluttered closet where dreams can be written into reality through our imaginations. Kyle often works from a large archive of collective familial objects passed down from their grandmother to his mother, and now to him. They ponder this collection and its authenticity to all aspects of his identity, as well as using it as source material to create new queer fairytales and express a more multifaceted idea of queer love. Through exploration of the motifs and symbols these kitschy objects hold Kyle implores their audience to meditate on ideas of gender signaling, heteronormativity, and the nuances of queer love.
Our Cheeks Blushed Amidst Prairie Grasses
In the cannon of photography when queerness is invited to the table to be discussed, it often is observed through the voyeuristic lens of a queer male photographing a fellow queer male in the nude. Though rejoicing in the body and sexual experience that comprises a slice of queer life proves valuable, an over glorification of these images minimizes the complexity of the queer identity. Growing up in the Midwest, queer love was reduced to a purely physical and sexual presence – something deemed disturbing by the hegemonic gaze, I transgress this to propose an expanded view of queerness in the landscape as an embodiment of my experience.
bell hooks puts it best when stating that “[being] Queer’ [is] not as being about who you’re having sex with (that can be a dimension of it); but ‘queer’ as being about the self that is at odds with everything around it and that has to invent and create and find a place to speak and to thrive and to live.”
What does queer love look like? How can we position queer love as a natural component within our more than human world? How do I tell my partner I love and long for him across hundreds of miles of distance? Through the photographic investigation of the Indiana Dunes, the site of my engagement, and the Iowan prairie, the place me and my partner now reside, I challenge oversimplified views of queer love by expanding naturalist heteronormative narratives of the landscape. Furthering this conversation, my partner and I perform still-lifes in our interior domestic space in search for a view of queerness that implores the romantic, complex, effeminate, and saccharine. Queerness isn’t detached from the landscape but is innate to our world and its inhabitants, from the cellular to the sunset.
A Q&A with the artist follows:
Materiality plays an important role in your work. Where does the importance of touch come from in your practice, and in specific, to photography?
Before I entered and began graduate school I worked full time at the Indiana State Museum as an Engagement Specialist where I developed educational material for guests to engage with throughout the exhibits. This allowed me access to the Paintings of Frank Dudley, a Landscape painter from Indiana who documents the sensation of the Indiana Dunes in his paintings in effort to capture the Indiana Dunes in efforts to help conserve the landscape. These landscape paintings became a large source of inspiration for my body of work. I knew I wanted to offer the landscape a moment of intervention into the film so it can make a mark on the image physically and Visually. Dudley’s paintings are often romantic and impressionist as they offer the idea of the beauty of the space instead of a direct representation. His brush strokes are present, precise, and intervene onto the landscape; this offers Dudley a place to express his emotional ties to the Dunes. Through activating touch on the film by integrating sand, water, and other ephemera from the dunes into the development process I hope to activate the dunes as a collaborator with me instead of something I have control over. As if the dunes itself kissed the film it is able to make a mark like a painter onto the image of itself. I was very inspired and moved by artist Odette England who engages with the surface of film to embed a sense of emotionality and intent to the work beyond just the preserved image, such as in her image “Dad 3 Right Foot” where and image of her childhood farm is photographed, taped to the bottom of her fathers shoe, and then walked on around the space. Instead of having another person intervene though I ask the Indiana Dunes itself to collaborate with me and kiss the images with its sand to leave marks of our love there.
Can you explain your choice in using landscape photographs for this series exploring family and being in community (or apart from them)?
When I first began graduate school I was making a lot of still lives and self portraits as I tried to navigate what I wanted to explicitly explore for my thesis and I kept coming to this feeling of loneliness and isolation from my loved ones that were now a few states away. The only way I knew to try and resolve this was to document the space in between us, physically, leading me to landscape photography. This became more focused though after my Fiance Walter Saide proposed to me at the Indiana Dunes, This space now held this event and our love and I wanted to try and show how the landscape and queerness could be tied together. My entire life growing up in Indiana Queerness was always positioned as something “unnatural” or not normal, by tieing queerness to the land as a normal function of ecosystems and animal groups beyond the human I hope to see that being queer is something normal across species beyond our own and not something to feel shame around but to be proud of. You are just as natural as two swans in love, the sand on the beach, or a group of clovers.
You use the term “gender signaling” to describe your work. How do you use that concept in your overall work in ways that might not be as readily evident?
Throughout my work I think about what I present and what my audience infers from what I am presenting to them, these pink dream fields often feel soft and feminine which contrast to our more masculine bodies. This is in efforts to help show that anyone can like any color and that pink for me is reclaimed as this queer signifier of love.
I also am an antique collector building upon an archive of Salt and Pepper shakers my Grandmother passed down to me. These figurines appear alongside figures throughout my bodies of work and are always presented as a “set” or “couple”. These figures also usually present in a stereotypical male female way due to this coupling of a set. The Shakers I collect and show though are either very feminine and still present as a set or couple queering them or vice versa.
The color pink is used in many of your works, can you explain your personal connection to color and the representation of your queer identity?
Pink first is my favorite color, during my time in undergrad I became associated with it due to my interest in 1950-60 mid century design where color is used more playfully across decor of the era, especially in the kitsch. I think that is where and why this color felt right for this project is that sense of kitschy sentimentality I am occupying. The pink signals a feeling of warmth, a feeling of love, a feeling of belonging but is also a little kitschy and campy to indulge in it in such a way. I also want to use it unabashedly as a male identifying individual people do not always think that is okay in places I grew up when it is just a color like any other. I also wanted to use a color you can find in nature and that is a “natural” hue to our environment. In my first apartment in Iowa the sunset a brilliant pink or red evernight into my place. Seeing that color every night made me feel like I belonged even when other spaces made me feel differently. As a result, I went out every night during this pink hour and photographed my environment. It began the search for and insertion of pink into the natural spaces feeling as if I was looking for places that already understood my emotional headspace through color alone.
I also think about the history of the color magenta. Magenta is a color that is chemically derived instead of made from natural ingredients. Magenta when first presented is a green crystal but when dissolved in water does it create this magenta hue. People even argue that magenta doesn’t exist because their is not a magenta wavelength of light. This story felt familiar to queer people as we are told we are unnatural or don’t exist when I see the sky turn magenta every night, or the magenta bloom of a local flower. That magenta exist and is apart of our landscape.
You take a playful and saccharine approach to this series’ theme, have you ever felt any pressure to make work that is different?
I feel pressure all the time to do different work. Before this body of work I made much darker melancholic work about self acceptance, but moving forward I wanted to make work and if that work was about my queerness I wanted it to be joyful and sweet at least for now. It felt important to make this for me in a way that felt like a hug from your partner, even though relationships are really complex I wanted to show the best of times and the overall love I feel for my Partner and making work around love that is uplifting. I think of the body of work in a similar way tonally as a love song or a young adult romance novel, where emotionality is hightented to portray the intensity of these feelings that may be reduced in the moment. I think about artists such as Clifford Prince King and Pixy Liao who navigate the world of love and relationships and what that can look like in a playful optimistic way.
