dream zones hormones undertones fish bones (2022-2023)

Realities of geographical and social isolation experienced by many trans folks on the east coast of so-called Canada were transformed through a technological sea change in the 1990s. The early internet became a zone of possibility: providing access to peer support, community resources, and political discourse on an international scale. Forums, blogs, chatrooms, and email chains (often linked together by queer and transgender webrings) offered the ability to both communicate with one another and to explore realities of gender transition in ways attentive to complex needs for privacy, safety, and community. Among these was Atlantic TransGender (ATG), a digital peer support group for east coast trans folks that operated from 1995 to the early aughts.

Inspired by several long-defunct websites now only accessible via the Internet Archive, dream zones hormones undertones fish bones imagines backward to the late 1990s in Atlantic Canada, recollecting a time of transfeminine community building and organizing emergent on the early internet. A dreamlike correspondence between two trans women in Newfoundland and Nova Scotia contextualizes life-affirming relationships across the Atlantic region at a time of new beginnings and precarious survival. Emplacing poetics of sea-touched tenderness within an intergenerational imagination, folkways of loss and resilience among transfeminine forebears evoke issues of archival resurfacing, speculation, and water damage. In this resistant past-present, trans histories and hopes are held by the ocean.

Installation view of Le septième pétale d'une tulipe-monstre, curated by Elise Anne LaPlante, at Galerie de l’UQAM in Montreal, QC. November 2023 to January 2024. Photos courtesy of Galerie de l’UQAM.