All at Once Qwear Fashion Show Recap at 13FOREST Gallery
On October 26 2024, the queer community and allies gathered together at 13FOREST Gallery for a celebration of our humanity through fashion as part of the Gallery’s “All At Once” exhibit. Each model styled and designed their outfit themselves and discussed what it meant to them, concluding with award-winning poet Amanda Shea performing some new work! The show also featured designs by the Style is Freedom brand. And we were thrilled to be joined with one of the artists in the show, Dorian Keeffe.
Enjoy the photos and see more info below.
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.
CREDITS
Producer: Sonny Oram
Director: Ru Heru
Photographer & Curator: Jaypix Belmer
Models:
Amanda Shea (featured performer)
Tee Mack
Vee Webster (make up by Andreza Moon)
Crystal Bi
Vela Velazquez
Jaypix Belmer
Photography: Jaypix Belmer, Pixworx
Venue: 13FOREST Gallery
Brands featured: Style is Freedom
