© Pia Paulina Guilmoth; “deer,” 2022; Archival pigment print (Edition of 3 + 2 APs); 18 x 22 inches, image; Courtesy of CLAMP, New York.

Two deer stare, stunned, their ears perked nervously straight up. Their sweet brown eyes have turned zombie white, caught in a camera flash rather than the headlights of a speeding Ford F-150 barreling down a dirty back road at night. One looks like she’s about to bolt, her body tensed in the tall grasses in desperate need of a mow. The other appears calmer as if she’s seen this before. Further in the distance, a third deer is only perceptible by its floating eyeballs glowing in the dark. Wedged between the two in the foreground is a person peering out of a heap, the ruffled, rippled, leaf-like mound of a ghillie suit, like a survivalist Kenny from South Park. Rather than a rifle, though, the person is holding a tray of apples and other deer-pleasing goodies. With the does’ shocked expressions and their human buddy’s direct gaze, there is something beguilingly quirky about the whole scene, almost Sally Mann-esque. Imagine living next door and peering out the window to observe this eccentric nightly snack time. They’re doing it again…check for ticks!

Pia Paulina Guilmoth’s black-and-white photograph deer was the work that drew me to her current show, Flowers Drink the River, at CLAMP. Yes, it was partially because I, too, have a devoted habit of communing with wild animals (my trio of squirrel friends, Doink, Doc, and Ruddy, plus my now-disappeared first buddy Chompies, rather than deer as I live in Manhattan). But that’s not the only reason. deer is a deeply American artwork with a twist. Deer are, of course, a hugely popular subject in American art—not just sweeping high art landscapes but, my preference, trashy, mass-produced art. Ever visited a hunter’s house? It’s often full of prints of regal bucks standing proudly in lush forest landscapes, usually hung right next to their disembodied heads as trophies. Grim. Not that I have a problem with hunting per se, but it is a ghoulish curatorial choice! In contemporary art, the deer painting that always sticks in my mind is Bo Bartlett’s updated American Gothic Young Life with a deadpan family standing in front of their truck, on top of which lies the limp carcass of a doe. Young Life is a portrait of not only an everyday white American family but the undercurrent of banal brutality that runs under our culture.

Guilmoth’s photograph is different—a rejection of that banal brutality, or at least positioning herself alongside the deer. In it, she—and that is her plopped alongside them—forges a cross-species relationship with the hunted rather than equating herself with the hunter. Even with the ghillie suit on, she’s attempting to get closer to the deer to share food rather than sneaking up on them to blow them to bits. deer showcases a hard-won quiet space of safety for both the deer and Guilmoth alike, an effort that becomes more resonant after reading the exhibition’s press release:

“Each night for a week in August, I would sit in the tall, tick-infested grass behind the orchard, covered in Scent Killer Gold, wearing a ghillie suit, holding a tray full of crushed apples in one hand and a 30-foot makeshift shutter release cable attached to my 4 × 5 camera in the other…The same family of deer would get more comfortable with my presence each night. Eventually, they were eating the ripe fruit from my hands. The following Tuesday, I would have my first HRT consultation. I was keeping it a secret, knowing there was no way I could safely transition in this place, but also no way I could hide my changing body over the following months and years.”

In the United States, particularly in rural environments, deer are often at risk from predators, hunters, and drivers fixated on calling invisible enemies they don’t know nasty names on the Internet. And as a trans woman, so is Guilmoth, whose body-obscuring ghillie suit and semi-hidden presence under the cover of darkness become more meaningful within the context of her nervousness about revealing her transition to a potentially phobic public. Now, is deer about transitioning or life as a trans woman? No. Yes. Yes and no. Whether or not these experiences are visible on the surface of the photographs or while feeding the deer, they’re still there, imbued within even small decisions of how Guilmoth inhabits the landscape.

© Pia Paulina Guilmoth; “bioluminescent powder-coated spider webs, photogram study #1,” 2024; Polaroid Polacolor 559 instant film prints (4x) (Unique); 5 x 4 inches, each; Courtesy of CLAMP, New York.

This same ambiguity runs throughout Flowers Drink the River. The gallery’s press release emphasizes Guilmoth’s identity and this body of work’s intersection with the first two years of her transition, particularly as she photographs the predominantly working-class, right-winger rural Maine region where she lives, which voted for Donnie T. three elections in a row. However, a viewer could easily peruse the exhibition, taking in the dreamy seafoam green Polaroids of mysteriously glittering spiderwebs (which Guilmoth preserves and sprinkles with bioluminescent powder), black-and-white photos of spectral dust figures kicked up on a dirt road like the ghosts of murdered hitchhikers and ripples on the surface of a pond at night, and the blood-red washed glow of the sliver moon, without thinking about the artist’s identity or gender at all. Nor do they need to. Only the multiple feminine hands with gorgeous, sparkling long nails that together hold a shimmering, metallic-looking spiderweb ethereally woven with daisies in the spellbinding we make a flower gesture toward some kind of Stevie Nicks-type coven. Even the two photographs with dominant human figures—matriarchy, featuring two women humping or erotically mud-wrestling covered in the sticky Maine riverbed mud, chunks of sludge sticking to their bodies like third, fourth, and fifth nipples, and daisy-eye with a topless person in grubby pants laying in the grass with a daisy poking from the ground like a third eye (the exact opposite of Katy Perry’s egregiously expensive, daisy-ripping trip to outer space (kinda) with Blue Origin), revealing their fuzzy armpits—could be written off as a hippie-dippie return to the land rather than queer people reclaiming it, fusing the body so often seen as unnatural with the natural.

Yet, so much of Flowers Drink the River reflects on transformations—dust growing into phantoms, ripples in the water that appear and disappear, the many phases of the moon, and the self-fashioned, fragile glamour of spiderwebs. Though not pictured directly, Guilmoth’s transition is part of this show-wide narrative of transformation too, just subtly, almost clandestine, so a viewer has to be able to pick up on its coded symbolism to sense it. In this relationship between trans identity and the rural landscape, Guilmoth’s work reminds me a lot of Ethel Cain and not only because Guilmoth’s spooky backwoods aesthetic intersects with much of Ethel Cain’s self-made videos on YouTube, wandering through the woods, marveling at abandoned nuclear power plants, and going “frog huntin.” Do you need to know Hayden Anhedönia is trans to appreciate Ethel Cain’s music? Not really. But if you listen for it, it’s there in her Southern Gothic storytelling. For instance, on Preacher’s Daughter, it’s in the alienation from daddy’s Pentecostalism and the family, in the yearning for a cozy and safe house in Nebraska and never really getting it, and in being at risk of exploitation and murder.

© Pia Paulina Guilmoth; “we make a flower,” 2024; Archival pigment print in ash wood frame (Edition of 3 + 2 APs); 29 x 24 inches; Courtesy of CLAMP, New York.

Though not as direct as Ethel Cain’s becoming dinner at the end of Preacher’s Daughter, there is an undercurrent of danger in Flowers Drink the River, too. In the tiny contact print, i’d look like a flower if i could (which now that we’re playing musical free association reminds me of Weyes Blood’s “God Turn Me into a Flower” on her equally mystical album And in the Darkness, Hearts Aglow), a white horse lays in front of a house on fire. This is not a gently billowing smoke blowing off a roof either—the house erupts into roiling flames from its windows, ready to collapse. Now, way (WAY) too many artworks, films, TV shows, viral videos, and really anything else under the sun get described as Lynchian these days, even more so since Lynch’s death. However, i’d look like a flower if i could is as close to Lynchian as an artist can get with the white horse from Twin Peaks and the burning buildings from Lost Highway and The Straight Story.

Lynch isn’t the only famous David fascinated with both the violence and fantasy of America that comes to mind in Flowers Drink the River. I mean, I can’t see a burning house without instantly thinking of David Wojnarowicz’s iconic stencil. More than a toasty nuclear family home, though, David  W.’s lifelong connection to nature looms large in the exhibition. Though Guilmoth’s world is much more “Sisters of the Moon” witchy feminine, I see connections to Wojnarowicz’s use of animals and natural landscape as symbols for the precarity of queer lives in America, whether burying himself in the Southwestern soil or holding a tiny frog in What is this little guy’s job in the world, and his juxtaposition of the freedom of the natural environment with the restrictive and repressive manmade hellscapes we’ve constructed for ourselves. Starting with the former, there is a fragile precarity to some of Guilmoth’s photographs. Take girl pills 6mg, 1.5 years, which is the most direct reference to transitioning in the show. In the photograph, moths flutter around a flickering candle dripping with wax. Their delicate wings, the patterns hypervisible with Guilmoth’s painstaking and patient use of large-format film, hover perilously close to the glowing, fire-enveloped wick, ready to burn up with one errant gust of wind. Though the moths may be passively suicidal in their attraction to light, they haven’t self-immolated quite yet. In fact, there is a kind of quiet magic to this photograph, the pleasure of getting too close to the flame.

© Pia Paulina Guilmoth; “night sky #7 (bleached polaroid 4×5 negative),” 2025; Archival pigment print; Courtesy of CLAMP, New York.

Returning to David W.’s contrasting of the natural with oppressive human civilization, Guilmoth’s show exists in an entirely separate universe from contemporary society in the harsh glare of daylight. There are no small-town strip malls, no “Fight Fight Fight” signs, no traffic lights or stop signs. Guilmoth’s world stands apart. Even the few figures in the show seem like odd nocturnal forest creatures that emerged behind the trees or from the soil. In an interview with Vogue, she said:

“The way I want to relate to the world, to other queer or trans people is not to literally show how hard life is, or to show the horror but to show the things that I have made in response, and in protection from the terror that the world can bring. And I think that the nighttime, and spider webs, and the backwoods can be eerie and ‘dark’, but maybe some people are just so used to sunshine, paved roads, and picture-perfect suburban communities. But these things are where I’ve found peace with myself. I’m more afraid of the daylight than anything. It’s a time when I’ve had most of my scary encounters with people, been harassed, been followed. At night it’s a lot easier to hide from danger, or not be detected at all as most people out in the country here retire to their homes.”

Interestingly, though Guilmoth focuses on the country night as a location for belonging, some of her works also have unexpected resonance with other manmade spaces like nightlife. Though I may have been drawn to Flowers Drink the River because of deer, I kept returning to night sky #7 (bleached polaroid 4×5 negative) again and again in CLAMP. A large archival pigment print, one of the few color works in the show, night sky #7 (bleached polaroid 4×5 negative) features a cluster of bright multiple exposure reflections of the moon in various phases. Without the work’s title, I could easily mistake this crowded collection of fractured bursts of light and prismed colors for the ricocheted refractions of club lights bouncing off of a mirror ball onto the filthy club floor, like the ones captured in Gabriel Martinez’s Queer Eclipses. night sky #7 (bleached polaroid 4×5 negative) asks essential questions: Is the moon just the Earth’s disco ball? And absent a local gay club—or one that you can feel comfortable enough in—is it enough to stand under its silver glow and spin? If Guilmoth’s Flowers Drink the River is any indication, yes, it is.