Kelsey Sucena

Kelsey Sucena

Paralytic States

Newspaper Print
Approx. 29.4” x 23.5”
2020

From the artist:

Paralytic States is an ongoing image-text project which combines personal diaristic-style essays with photographs taken across the United States. The project began during the 2016 election cycle when I first traveled from New York to California in order to make images of America as it was undergoing a massive political shift. Against this backdrop, I too have been undergoing monumental changes within the way that I view myself, slowly coming into my identity as nonbinary/trans*.

Written over the last two years, the essays act as fragmented vignettes situated within a loose narrative. They straddle the space between memoir and manifesto, utilizing a queer/closeted epistemology to consider questions relating to community, country, and identity. 

Taken together, the photographs and essays work in concert to produce an intertextual dialogue that is both intimate and political. What emerges from that conversation is an uncertain document of the last four years.

Book review by Marissa Iamartino |

I shiver this morning on the floor. We’ve just had our first snow and the room is so cold I can see my breath float up to the ceiling. Magic, I think.

With the turn of each newsprint page, I feel the crinkle of fragile material; the chilled air passing through its porousness; the transference of energy from thought to arm to hand to fingertips. I let go of the page’s corner and watch as it floats gently downward - like a giant flag falling - until everything comes to rest. I picture myself from above: body splayed over three overlapping rugs, the large book of loose images open-face in front of me and a shifting pile of pages off to my left. “Paralytic States” opens up as far as my arm can reach -- and the realization is gleeful: When is the last time a book made me take up this much space?

Never.

- - -

Kelsey Sucena’s “Paralytic States” unites diaristic essays with a series of photographs made during multiple road trips across the United States. Throughout the image-text work, Sucena seeks to observe America’s physical and socio-political landscape alongside the landscape of their own shifting gender identity. “Call these essays interpretive moments'' (p.2) they say, and so I soak up their words, every soft metaphor; characteristics of an unfamiliar plant; names of towns I’ve never been to; butterfly migration patterns; and song lyrics to “Black Me Out” by Laura Jane Grace, who was also the inspiration for the work’s title. Paralytic States features 21 essays that weave together hints of critical theory, ruminations on personal encounters, and natural anomalies -- culminating into an (ongoing) body of work that expands upon the intricacies of daily life from a nonbinary and Trans* perspective while simultaneously subverting the classic American Road Trip.

Paralytic States, in its current form, was created from 2016 - 2020, and I can’t help but sit here, - as we anxiously await the results of the Presidential Election - and reflect on the past four years in awe and horror. Sucena writes during 2017, “Tomorrow promises to be just as lively or just as uneventful. Events compound and big news finds us numb. Each day it seems that we teeter closer to the edge of something and also somehow, the edge of nothing.” (p. 47). They find a way to place a mirror to the mundane as if it’s poetry. Yes, that familiar feeling of big news with its exhausting 24-hour-cycle, equal parts fear mongering and flawed reporting, every day pushing us closer to relinquishing all care, all control. Let’s face it: We are teetering. No matter who wins this election, will we be inching closer to Utopia? I initially wrote a line or two about the fascist who will lie, cheat, and steal to remain in the White House during a global pandemic he has failed to adequately acknowledge...but instead, I’ll just refresh my Google search for “Election Results 2020”, and stare at the sea of red on the map. I click the side button on my phone to darken the screen for the fiftieth time this morning.

The micro-to-macro shifts within Paralytic States create opportunities for layered connectivity between image and text, while intersectionality comes forth in overt and quiet ways. In the text, we encounter sections titled things like A DEVIL’S MONUMENT or ABOUT THE OCEAN, (a personal favorite) or SIOUX CITY or SOME NOTES ON THE USE OF PRONOUNS. There’s a consistent shift in the way that spaces and behaviors are being unpacked: ruminations on the ocean become woven into a dialogue considering the challenges of taking up space as a Queer body -- and eventually these personal reflections crescendo into windows of analysis for what is paradoxical American-ness. Sucena writes, “Americans are resilient, or, Americans believe that they are resilient, and this is a fundamental flaw. A culture of bootstraps and hard work, informed by our Christian propensity for self-sacrifice, gives way to the great American death drive present in some way even within the most radical activist communities” (p.37) and it sits above a delicate line drawing, in red, of a Walmart/Sam’s Club sign that lacks tangible connection to the ground. A tiny bird sits below it and a man walks away as heart-shaped posters adorn the lower left pole. I get the feeling it’s a Walmart we all know. 

Back to this idea of the paradox: it’s something Sucena presents and nimbly addresses often in their writing. In INTRODUCTION: FIRE ISLAND, they confront their position as a Park Ranger while “tucking away those little spots of Queerness” (p.1) explaining, “We are tasked with telling the stories America wants to hear about itself. I have long believed that stories shape us profoundly.” (p.2). This kind of confrontation of the self alludes to much larger themes that present throughout the work, like the United States’ deep-rooted histories of racism, patriarchy, and heteronormativity. Sometimes, it feels like Sucena writes with an all-seeing third eye (which, I can say from spending considerable time with them, is not limited to their presence on paper). Kelsey’s approach in both form and content translates into a direct rejection of the binary -- and their nuanced acknowledgement of the self as a multi-self also challenges traditional Western ideas about colonization, religion, and democracy, in addition to gender. “As I prepared myself for this new, and unusual, life of art making I began to notice the sense of alienation and estrangement imposed by the dual pressures of late-capitalism and cisnormativity. I didn’t know it then but, that weirdness I was so proud of was just the first sign.” (p.49).

The big book - the part-two of “Paralytic States” - is a package of ten unbound, poster-size images that can freely disconnect and disperse from their folded “binding”. I dream about layering and pasting them like wallpaper all across an empty wall to see them interact at large-scale. As I turn through the images one-by-one, the ink-soaked paper forms an equal ratio of land-marks and marked-lands. I, at some point, realize my act of processing them is actually an act of redistribution. In my mind and on my floor, I begin to use relational logic to connect people and places. The Mandalay Bay building looms heavily in gold with an OASIS sign whispering in the corner. A man in red leather pants lays in wet grass with a loving dog: I can’t tell if the red marks on his forehead are tattoo, skin, or blood, but all feels, somehow, the same. Donald Trump’s face hides Sharpie’d on a turned-around pumpkin as it lays next to a giant guillotine. A FedEx tractor-trailer speeds away from a smokestack horizon. Another truck follows it in the distance, traveling along the highway trickle that stretches across the flat, weathered land. And we can infer there’ll be another truck after that. And after that. 

The images exist on a newsprint-style paper (same as the book of text) and housed within a large, deep-red cover that features BEEF, Bushwick, 2019 on the front. In the original image, BEEF’s heart bleeds red, seeping outward with a mix of glitter and texture deeper into the fabric of their white blouse. On the cover of this collection of images, however, the heart has taken over. Everything is red. In both books, red recurs like a STOP sign, constantly signaling...well, something. Fear, fight, inter-connectivity? For me, the consistent color functions as a connector between time, space, and being. Red shrinks into the line-drawings that look made of thread. Whether depicting people, animals, map routes, or rocks, all things are treated the same: as traces for us to follow and hold, becoming outlines of the experiences they once were. In the book of images, a bright red MAGA hat leaps off the head of a woman holding a Pomeranian. The light hits her evenly and her face, half in shadow, looks eerily made of porcelain. I squint my eyes. Is she real? 

I squint my eyes often, looking for clarity around the edges of things, the edges of myself, reflections in others. I think we all might do that when we’re searching.

Unleashing Paralytic States from the large envelope that arrived at my door last month was one of the most joyful experiences of this difficult year. The books’ demand to take up space is not limited to the work in tangible form. The notion translates to bodies who deserve more space and feed into our perception of ourselves.

The work, as a devotion to the world, to others, and to the self, is astoundingly beautiful -- and I’ve spilled a few tears on it’s thin newsprint pages. I believe they’re tears of gratitude, maybe mixed in with my weekly regimen of “fear-tears for the future”, but in Kelsey’s ever-growing collection of images and text, I see resistance, and in turn, hope. I see it in other artists, writers, makers, and activists, too. I’ll be sharing this copy of Paralytic States with my local community and I’d like to acknowledge that there’s so much more to be written about. In the acts of sharing to come, I have no doubt Paralytic States will take on new forms and meanings across time zones, boundaries, and borders. 

Paralytic States was designed by Martha Ormison, printed in an edition of 100 in England, and delivered by Exhibitions Delivered. Kelsey Sucena can be reached at kelseysucena.com or kelsey.sucena@gmail.com.

I leave this at 11:02AM on Friday, November 6, 2020, as we wait for the final mail-in ballots to determine our next president of the United States. 

“I’ve been thinking of freedom lately. Thinking mainly about the ways in which socialist political projects intersect with this deep, supposedly American desire for freedom. I have sought freedom throughout my life in many ways. I fantasize about it often, and about the very small amount of freedom it would take to adequately embody myself. Call it the freedom of soft skin cells illuminated within the beam of my projector. The freedom of some fat in different places. The freedom to be called by my right pronouns, to move through the world as I move through myself, as though freedom and movement are one and the same.” (p.12).