Artist Sonja John Paints Floral Odes to QTPOC Intimacy

In one of the rare figurative paintings from Yard Work, artist Sonja John’s recent solo show at Harlem’s Rio Galleries, two femme figures hold each other’s hands, as if mid-dance, or sharing secrets, or comforting each other. You are safe here, the canvas seems to whisper. Deeper into the gallery, a chartreuse breezeblock tapestry glistens under gallery lights, looking exactly like jade. It’s actually made of mylar, the artist tells me, but I can’t stop looking at John’s worn hands, blistered from printmaking chemicals. They remind me that the safety of queer spaces — where we can feel free to dance, share secrets, and comfort each other — are always crafted by hand.  

Born in Valhalla, New York, John was inspired to start painting by her father’s love for art and photography. John grew up going to art museums all over New York City with her dad. “He’d give me sketchbooks and ask me thoughtful questions about what I was paying attention to, without injecting too much of his own opinions into my own point of view,” the artist tells me. “Later, as an adult, his love of photography features as a silent collaborator to all of my compositions, especially in collage.”

In John’s work, landscapes especially breathe with queer life. In one of her paintings, the tropical flowers known as Delonix regia leap off the canvas in contrasting colors. Hesitant to expose human subjects to a cishet white gaze, John instead renders the intimacy of queer love through the natural world, flowers pronouncing themselves present as flamboyantly as any performance. 

Following her recent show, Sonja John and I discuss the architecture of coming out, the queerness of nature, and the value of withholding depictions of QTPOC intimacy from commercialized consumption.

I’d love to start by asking you how you landed on your distinctive visual language?

Much of the imagery I use originates from my parents’ birthplaces: Trinidad, Jamaica, and the Philippines. I reference the colors and shapes of various botanical organisms found in those landscapes, such as flamboyant flowers (Delonix regia), turquoise jade vine (Strongylodon macrobotrys), ackee (Blighia sapida), breadfruit (Artocarpus altilis), and poui flowers (Tabebuia aurea) to challenge perceptions of “natural” or “unnatural” color. These specific forms also create a discourse with abstraction. I believe that much of what we perceive to be abstract has to do with recognition. By choosing plant forms that are familiar to one group of people, but perhaps less obvious to a North American or European audience, the collages, textiles, and paintings I make can elicit multiple responses and concurrent, sometimes opposing, conversations. 

Ackee, for example, is the national fruit of Jamaica. It is an incandescent red-orange when fully ripe, with three huge black seeds that protrude from its ripening, splitting base, like eyes. Against a backdrop of the more subdued array of typical North American grocery store fruits, it is a fluorescent alien, not immediately recognizable as an essential food source — except to those for whom it is a daily or weekly dietary feature. 

Through your work as an artist and curator, you explore a narrative of trade and exchange between Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. In your depictions of diaspora, what interests you about the landscapes of the Philippines, Trinidad, and Jamaica? 

Growing up, I was struck by the many agricultural and culinary similarities between the two seemingly disparate regions of Southeast Asia and the Caribbean. The Philippines has breadfruit; Jamaica has breadfruit. The Philippines has star apple; so does Trinidad & Tobago. The only significant differences to me were the different names used for each fruit. So many of the fruits and flowers perceived to be endemic to the Caribbean are, in fact, a product of colonial exploits – everything from ornamental plants to staple crops like breadfruit were products of white supremacy, brought over from Europe, Asia, Polynesia, and even Africa to ‘tame’ an unruly landscape. 

This exchange mirrors my family’s stories of immigration. Turquoise jade vine (Strongylodon macrobotrys), an impossibly vivid blue-green bloom related to kidney beans, was discovered on Luzon in the 19th century and brought over to the U.S. and the Caribbean. Delonix regia is endemic to Madagascar and now lowers all over Southeast Asia, the Caribbean, and Latin America.  Despite harrowing journeys across the world, these plants have taken root in new landscapes and flourished – which, I think, is the story of resilience carried by migrants everywhere.

I spent my trip back to the tropics poring over your body of work. I specifically wanted to ask about the paintings “Washerwoman” and “Lovers (Eve’s Garden)” Queer bodies like the diasporic figures you portray are so often exoticized, and bodies performing labor are so often rendered invisible. Can you tell me more about the challenges of representing figures that have so commonly been portrayed as both exotic and invisible? 

I have a tense, often uncomfortable relationship with depictions of the body, especially when depicting the Black, queer body. Even as current U.S. legislation does everything within its power to erase, obfuscate, define, and control the presence of Black, queer, and trans bodies in space, much of the media (film, television, visual art) I’ve seen depicting us is predicated upon our struggles to survive, our pain. It often renders our bodies outlandish, as sites of spectacle. In “Washerwoman,” I depict a woman bent over washing clothes or fabric in a river, surrounded by various tropical plants — ginger flowers sprout from the woodland floor, flamboyant blooms from the canopy. The washerwoman’s fabric is literally sewn and draped over the canvas. By dyeing, sewing, and embroidering every aspect of the painting by hand, I wanted to vividly embody the washerwoman’s labor in bold color, drawing attention to the invisible nature of gendered labor.

YARD WORK also features a series of architectural installations. How do you see your installation work, particularly the breezeblock tapestries?

Architecture is an expression of power over space, place, and movement. Hostile architecture such as pigeon spikes or anti-homeless railings on benches are a few expressions of that control. Many of the aesthetics and production of queer theory centers around North American and Western European models of “coming out of the closet.” The process of coming out creates a zone of social demarcation; we are expected to disclose our otherness in public. My installations are a way for me to explore spatial interactions, and to trouble the binaries of indoor and outdoor, public and private, visible and hidden. The perforations of the breezeblock walls allow light, air, and sound to pass through while still delineating space. They resist rigid boundaries with their fluidity, fluttering when someone passes by, creating reflections and refractions all around them. Rather than depicting Black femmes playing within the still image plane, I wanted to activate space through installation; the viewer becomes the figure in the garden, loving, playing, and exploring openly or in secret behind the breezeblock wall. 

Queer art so often depicts, celebrates, and champions the body. Your work instead celebrates botany and the natural landscape. How do you see the way you depict queerness in your own art?

I am wary of painting figures, especially because the people I paint tend to be loved ones or myself – mostly queer and trans folks of color. I don’t believe that the whole world ought to have immediate visual access to our bodies, our intimacy, or the ways that we desire. The cisgender, heterosexual, white gaze tends to be consumptive; it presumes access to our lives and bodies, demands unsolicited explanations to the supposedly outlandish ways that queer, Black, and trans people live our lives. I don’t want to give easy access to that. I find a certain freedom from that gaze by painting landscapes, printing flowers, making collages and textiles of floral abstractions.

Additionally, the political projects of colonization and white supremacy tend to separate the human experience from the incredible diversity of nature. So much of the natural world is queer. Queer and trans people exist outside! Nature, the outdoors, the yard, the garden: these spaces not only belong to us, but reflect us in the myriad sexual and reproductive systems found across dozens of organisms. 

Clownfish, grouper, and angelfish are all creatures that change sex as a regular part of their life cycle. Orchids and other self-pollinating plants defy binaries with their hermaphroditic reproduction. By visualizing queerness solely within the confines of the human body, we may be unintentionally continuing that white supremacist project of divorcing humans from nature. 

Lastly, if you could compare your energy or your way of being to a tropical flower, what would you be?

I don’t think that I’d be a tropical flower. Once, I was described as a Venus flytrap (Dionaea muscipula). I thought being compared to such carnivorous botany was very high praise.

This interview has been edited and condensed.