Ferris Ramirez

I make work across disparate media in a restless attempt to connect with the men in my life that I struggle to keep around. I fear not having enough to remember them by, so I take parts of them with me, whether through adopting their mannerisms or creating impressions of them. My practice translates private longing into images, sounds, and gestures that speak to distance and attachment. The work is messy and uncomfortable because that is what desire is—the same desire I was taught to be ashamed of when I was younger.

Growing up in California in the early 2000s, I rarely saw anyone who resembled me in mainstream media. Family birthdays, Christmases, weddings, and funerals were often the times when I would be reminded of my Filipino heritage, but as I started to grow older, I fell out of touch with my culture. In response to this slow erasure, I make work that grounds my existence and experience as a queer person of color.

Materiality and sensuality are critical to my work, whether through wax-coated prints leaned onto walls, conversations that straddle the line between caring and carnal, or reimagined archives of men who exist between memory and fantasy. My identity smears across other men’s through acts of making and unmaking as I navigate inherited and fictionalized histories, trying to understand how I love and how I push away. Yet this is an unrequited attempt at recognition. That uncertainty, that ambiguity, that slippage, is where tenderness meets violence and the work comes alive. In building what I have lost, I reveal how imagination itself can be a way to hold close what has always been just out of reach.