No Place Like It

In Catherine Opie’s 1993 photograph Self-Portrait/Cutting, the artist’s back becomes a canvas for a child’s stereotypical drawing of a house: stick figure parents and child, picture windows and pitched roof, a sun peeking through clouds. Carved into flesh, the image becomes violent. Drops of blood evoke the abuse that so many queer and trans people are victim to, often inside their own homes. Such divergences of meaning appear again and again in Dreaming of Home, at SoHo’s Leslie-Lohman Museum of Art. Motifs of household intimacy abound: Clifford Prince King’s Where Seed Falls, for example, testifies to the joys of domestic routines. Discomfort with the American dream is present, too: Amos Mac and Zackary Drucker’s photo series highlights the negative friction between queer bodies and suburban space. Home, in the end, is open to interpretation, reconstruction, and making space for all the ways we might love.