“Sophy” from Gabrielle Muller’s exhibition
While taking photo courses at the School of Art, I began photographing my friends at YDS in the Spring of 2019. I was curious about the way photography and photographs function in communal spaces, and more specifically, the way photographs shape and preserve institutional narratives. I was also studying the way shame and guilt have operated as a means of establishing and consolidating power in theological claims about gender, sexuality, and otherness. I decided to build a project that challenged the prominence of the taken-for-granted current stories told by the photographs on the walls of YDS, by centering queer visibility.