Project Space Residency

Kelsey Sucena (NY)

January 7 – February 4, 2027

Artist Statement

My practice is rooted in the cultivation of meaningful, intimate, organic and connective social situations, where the camera and projector act as both witness to and catalyst for trans* liberation. My latest project, Roadkill Country, documents long trips spent driving hours across state and across country in my search for t4t love and kinship.

In it, the ‘road’ functions as a metaphor for modern Americanism—a decaying site of collision with the potential to liberate and to destroy. Just as highway infrastructure displaces native wildlife, current social policy renders the trans* subject as ‘roadkill,’ the unfortunate byproduct of mass social engineering which renders the trans* body “damaged” and inert.

My work insists on the significance of queer kinship. Through it I aim to produce sustainable social architectures that resist the isolation of the rural landscape, transforming the photographic encounter into a site of radical propaganda and collective survival.

Bio

Kelsey “Chloë” Sucena (she/her, b. 1994) is a transexual photographer based in the isolated hills of New York’s Southern Tier. Her work concerns the interplay of text and image in the shaping of narrative. Alongside collaborators, she crafts and performs slideshows under the name Pale Horse, combining analog photographs, auto-theoretical text, and experimental music into jeremiads on the crisis of trans* life. She holds an MFA in Image Text (Ithaca, 2020) and a BFA in Photography (Purchase, 2016). She works as an Assistant Professor of Photography in Alfred, New York, where she lives with her cat Talbo.

Project Space Residencies are supported by The New York State Council on the Arts with the support of Governor Kathy Hochul and the New York State Legislature, The Joy of Giving Something Foundation, The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, and Monroe County, NY. Photography-based artists participating in the program receive support from the Phillip and Edith Leonian Foundation.