At a time where transness is simultaneously overexposed and lambasted on the political stage and trans people are being legislated out of a right to exist in public, A Place I Keep Dreaming About presents the trans subject as a fact of nature that cannot be excluded from any realm. Just as the concepts of natural and artificial are socially constructed, Stachura’s subjects create themselves—as all people do. Documenting a kind of selfhood in context, this series expands upon Stachura's portraiture, shifting into focus from the centrality of the subject to the exchange between the subject and their surroundings, the belonging in one's own body and in the spaces they create/that create them. Against backdrops of concrete walls overgrown with blooms, bedrooms, and a clearing in the woods, Stachura’s subjects stand without explanation or footnote.
The experience of this body of work is futuristic, not in a sense of naïveté or false idealism, but of a steady and confident gaze at an inevitable trans horizon. The lack of temporal or spatial cues within these photographs invokes a sense that these images occur at a separate time and place, a space before or after the end of the world—a deep breath before collapse. There is a confidence, a sureness, to the photographer and subject. This is my world, and I am only letting you see these parts of it. You couldn’t begin to understand everything we are capable of, the possibilities of our bodies and lives.
adapted from text written by Clem McNabb and Chloe Sanders