How would you dress if you could celebrate every part of your identity without judgment? This is the question we explore in our queer fashion performance at 13FOREST gallery’s All at Once show.

When: Saturday October 26th, 4-6 PM

Where: 13FOREST Gallery, 167A Massachusetts Ave, Arlington, MA 02474

Featuring

Want to model for the show? Email sonny.oram@gmail.com with some photos!

About the fashion show

Queer identities are often reduced to performances designed for consumption by a cis-heteropatriarchal gaze. We are pressured to package ourselves in ways that allow the dominant culture to recognize our existence. A trans man in a skirt provokes confusion. A lesbian in heels becomes a spectacle for the male gaze. These expectations create a trap, where only the most palatable versions of queerness are deemed acceptable. 

This fashion show challenges these constraints and imagines a world where queer embodiment can exist beyond the limitations of societal expectations—a world where we reclaim our bodies and identities on our own terms. We envision a space where gender and fashion are not tethered to rigid binaries, but are fluid and liberating. A space where the body is not a battleground for street harassment, objectification, or judgment, but a vessel for expression and joy.

Through this performance, we strive to envision a reality where our queerness and multitudes of identity are valid simply because we exist. As we collectively imagine and embody this freedom, we create a future where everyone can be free.

We invite you to join us in this vision. Attend the show in an outfit that reflects your truest self, the one you would wear if there were no fear, no judgment—only celebration.

We can create the future we want, together, all at once.

About All at Once

13FOREST Gallery is pleased to present All at Once, featuring new work by Kathryn Geismar and Dorian Keeffe.

In All at Once, Geismar and Keeffe engage in deeply personal reflections on identity through the lens of gender transition. Though the process of self-discovery is universal, acknowledging and realizing a trans identity is a subset of that experience that develops in a uniquely public and political way. Through Geismar and Keeffe we witness gender transition from the dual perspectives of an outsider, Geismar, whose child has been transitioning for several years, and an insider, Keeffe, who has recently begun their own journey as a transmasc person. With vulnerability and honesty Geismar and Keeffe lay bare the intricacies of gender presentation and embrace the transience of identity.  

Geismar’s latest series of paintings capture fragments of faces as they peer into or edge out of the composition. Against a simple color field, Geismar’s subject, her adult child Sam, is both assertive and inscrutable. Throughout Sam’s process of gender exploration, Geismar embarks on a parallel journey of reckoning with her own identity as a mother and with her relationship to Sam as she grows into her changing identity. Playing with temporality, Geismar layers translucent portraits of herself at different ages and of Sam at different moments of identification. Referencing Sargent’s Madame X and Manet’s Olympia, Geismar blends Sam’s appearance with elements of art history, further disrupting linear constructions of identity. Her subjects refuse to materialize fully; leaving portions of the composition sketchy, abstract, or hazily rendered, Geismar visualizes the liminality of identity.

Learn more here