Michael Borowski

I am a visual artist whose expanded photographic practice examines cultural values embedded in urban and domestic spaces. My work is research-driven and critically engages with architecture, technology, and the environment. Projects span experimental documentary work, to staged tableaus with hand-made props, to composited digital environments. Construction and fabrication are recurrent metaphors in my work. Design always reflects political values, personal biases, fears and desires. The places that we inhabit are made up. The nature of home, both as a physical and psychological space, has been a continuous source of material in my work. I photograph domestic spaces as a reflection of personal identity and kinship, or the lack thereof. As a queer artist I challenge notions of any space being framed as natural or neutral. Part of my practice involves researching unexamined LGBTQ+ histories and spaces outside of major metropolitan areas. In my ongoing series Small Town Sex Shops (2014 – present), I photograph sites of sexual desire in rural areas. During long drives, I began to notice the prominence of adult video stores located just outside of towns, tucked away behind gas stations and truck stops. The root of the word “obscene” means “off stage.” The remote location of these shops reflects a certain public attitude towards sexuality. It also reflects a more complicated reality of small town values. Instead of representing these spaces as urban eyesores, I photograph them as symbols of proud deviance. My research into sexuality and architecture led me to Azurest South, the historic home and studio designed in 1938 by Amaza Lee Meredith in Ettrick, Virginia. Despite her exclusion from the architecture profession for being an African American woman, Meredith designed one of the earliest International Style buildings in Virginia, which she inhabited with another woman Dr. Edna Mead Colson. My project Azurest (2018-2019) combines photographs of the home and ephemera from Meredith’s archive. The color blue is prominent in the building and echoed in cyanotypes made from Meredith’s personal snapshots showing African Americans engaging in travel and leisure activities. The project orients Azurest South as a site for examining the intersections between race, queerness, and domestic space. It asks what it means to build a home for oneself within bigoted obstructions. This research and body of work have been supported by a grant from the Graham Foundation.