How Shall I Live Now in the Unexpected Present, 2026
“Shot on 35 mm film, rubin’s photographs offer uncanny domestic scenes of two bodies in transition. The work engages the history of photography between lovers and its often exploitative gaze on trans and queer bodies. In these queer portraits, gender and intimacy are not treated as fixed states or completed transformations, but as things in motion, negotiated in dailyness. The images linger in bedrooms and bathrooms, in rest and in maintenance. Limbs mirror one another; a leg meets a leg. Human and animal forms fold together. Green surfaces, house plants, and domestic light frame and obscure the scenes. The images resist sharpness, preferring proximity over clarity. rubin’s photographs open a field of attention to the soft and strange: how we share our lives with one another, how intensity and banality mingle in the everyday, and how to live within change rather than beyond it. The photographs are alive with what is ripe, what is molted. Time and love dilate for an “unexpected present.” The exhibition takes its title from Kaveh Akbar's poem, Against Dying.“
- K. Bradford and hannah rubin
