Fishworm

‘Fishworm’ is about dykes digging through trash. “Created over the past 7 years, collecting stuff people have thrown away or forgotten about —mostly photos— sifting through abandoned house debris, upturned mouldy cardboard boxes, the mouse shit-filled hunting camp at the end of the road, a local politician’s discarded gay porn collection, a junk shop near the waterfall, yard sale trash piles. The result is a jumbled, revised, chopped and screwed history (antique-y2k) of old mill towns in the Sandy River Valley and villages nestled in the pines. If you feel slightly uneasy here, so do we, being gay and trans women in a rural place, trying to find belonging in the same types of places we've lived our whole lives. Piecing the images together is an attempt to make sense of where you fit in a culture that doesn’t always want you, and how you can love a place that doesn’t always love you back. The images in ‘Fishworm’ were found within a 60-mile radius of the artists’ home in rural central Maine. Everything is scanned with an old xerox found sitting in the rain outside of the town fire department on Heavy Dump Day in 2024.” — Pia & Jesse 232 p, ills bw, 22 x 28 cm, pb, English