Lois Bielefeld

Exhibition Title: within the hold of ( )
Friendships can be ambiguous: passing or lifelong, intimate or surface, lacking the roadmap and prescribed behaviors of family. But what happens when we seek more from our friendships? When we ask our friends to fill the void of familial acceptance, to be the support our families of origin fail to provide? This series takes that question as its territory, insisting on the complexity, vulnerability, and raw beauty of connections forged often in mutual necessity. within the hold of ( ) is a large-scale photographic tableau series depicting queer chosen family. The title gestures toward what chosen family holds and what holds us, the space inside the parentheses both protected and unfinished.
The term "chosen family" was coined by anthropologist Kath Weston in Families We Choose (1991), describing how queer communities banded together and supported each other, notably during the AIDS crisis. Chosen families are not utopian. They are built from need, shaped by loss, and held together by ongoing acts of care. At this political moment, when queer and trans lives are under sustained threat and the definition of family is being narrowed by legislative force, this work insists on visibility and complexity as acts of resistance.
Each photograph is built collaboratively over three to five months. Participants are co-collaborators: they shape the narrative, determine casting, select the objects that fill the frame, and regularly write the narrative titles. They decide how their family is seen. The resulting photographs are large-scale tableaux, formally constructed and grounded in the specific lives and domestic spaces of real people. Each participant receives a signed archival print.

Website https://www.loisbielefeld.com