From where the current slows, 2026
a solo exhibition at LHUCA, Lubbock Texas
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Her Song, 2026 - Installation
Before the body, there is water
An Essay on from where the current slows by Dustin Lynn Staggs I knew Eden Imrie before I knew Eden Imrie. We met when they were Amber, before the name settled into itself the way water finds its basin, at a point in my life when everything seemed to be loosening. Early February, I believe. That strange hinge between seasons where nothing is fully one thing or the other. I had just begun to understand myself differently, or perhaps more honestly, and as with most honest things, it came as a quiet unraveling rather than a declaration. Most of my life I had spent learning how to exist quietly in the Ozarks, knowing I was different from the masculine image of my father and the father before him. I didn’t know you needed to live so quietly until you realize how much louder you are than others, a current of truth roaring under the top layer of rocks begging to pull you under. I learned how to feel something without naming it, how to move around myself the way water moves around stone. By the time I met Eden, that quiet had started to crack. Not loudly. Not all at once. Just enough to let something through. A mutual friend — queer, poetic, the kind of person who seems to exist as a bridge between people and ideas — introduced Eden and I. That same friend had handed me a book that, without hyperbole, unhinged the closest door I’d been slamming shut for years. It felt, at the time, like a holy sequence of events. Not in the way the church taught me holiness, but in the way something aligns so precisely it feels authored by something beyond coincidence. The following week, I stood inside “the year my heart turned to water,” Eden’s first chapter in what has become an ongoing excavation of self, place and the quiet violence of being unnamed. That exhibition asked what happens when you soften, when you let yourself erode. This one questions what happens next. What happens when you sink. “from where the current slows” does not constitute a typical continuation. It’s a descent. If the last body of work was about release, the moment of deviating from the road you were told to follow, this is what happens beneath the surface, where light fractures and language loses its authority. Eden doesn’t guide you gently into this space. They orient you. Before the viewer meets the body, they confront impediments: nets strung like thresholds, altars built from ragged domestic leftovers and passageways that defy your inclination to move freely. You are slowed, redirected, made to enter with intention. It’s a subtle but undeniable gesture that reflects the experience of queerness in places like Arkansas, where nothing is ever quite given to you directly. You learn to move sideways. You learn to read what is hidden. And there is so much here in this work that is hidden. Images unveil themselves in layers — cotton, chiffon, thread — each one asking you to look again. A shadow that evaporates when you get too close. Jesus fish stitched quietly into the underlayer, invisible until you learn how to see. The art resists immediacy. It refuses consumption. It demands duration. While standing in it all at Eden’s studio on Mount Sequoyah, I find myself thinking about the Ozark waters that we grew up wading ourselves in. About how this region was formed not by force, but by persistence, water carving through limestone over centuries, creating hollers and caves and underground rivers that hold more than they reveal. Eden’s work operates in that same register. It is not didactic, but it is relentless. And it is unmistakably queer. What struck me most about this body of work is not just its queerness, but its reluctance to perform queerness in ways that are legible or safe. There is little interest in visibility as a spectacle. Instead, Eden leans into something far more complicated: embodiment as contradiction. The poems that accompany this work read like spells, like confessions, like memories that haven’t decided what they are yet. In “Banishing the Woman of Smoke,” Eden writes of pouring something out of the body “like spoiled milk,” a line that lingers with a kind of sour clarity. This is not a clean release; it is not a triumphant becoming; it is messy, bodily, irreversible. In another, a woman is described birthed from mist, sensual and unknowable, dissolving the boundary between desire and danger. Another piece has intimacy looping back on itself — almost-relationships, almost-touch, almost-language — until longing becomes its own form of haunting. The common thread is rupture without closure. Eden told me, at one point in their studio, that this exhibition is about what happens “in the absence of communication.” That sentence hasn’t left me. Because in that silence, I have found, everything else becomes louder. This is shadow work, but not in the aestheticized, Instagrammed sense of the word. This is the real deal. Sitting with the parts of yourself that are inconvenient. Seeing your own reflection in the systems that hurt you. And choosing, somehow, to remain. There is also a confrontation happening here, one that feels specific to the Arkansas Bible Belt I was raised in. The Gospel hums beneath the surface of this work, as material. Eden pulls at it, rethreads it, exposes its contradictions. The word Elohim — a plural, non-gendered name for God — is reintroduced not as a correction, but as a complication. Something that disrupts the singular masculine authority so often imposed onto it. Growing up in the Bible Belt, you learn quickly that language is power. That naming something can both sanctify and erase it. What Eden does here is neither. Instead, they destabilize the act of naming altogether. What if the story was always queer? What if it was only ever straightened in translation? And then there is the body. Or rather, the absence of it — until it is suddenly, undeniably present. Eden places their own body within the work as a form of responsibility. There’s a vulnerability there, too, but it’s a choice that is deliberate. In a region where queer bodies are still politicized, still scrutinized, still at risk, there is an ethics to that decision. An unwillingness to throw the burden on anyone else. When the body does appear, it emerges the way everything else does here, through water, through distortion, through the slow realization that you are looking at something you were not initially allowed to see. By the time you reach it, you have already been changed. The title, “from where the current slows.” suggests a pause, but not an ending. A place where movement becomes perceptible, where you can finally feel the direction you’ve been taken. In rivers, these are the areas where silt settles, allowing for a brief period of clarity before the current takes hold again. This exhibition exists in that kind of space. It asks the viewer to linger in the in-between, to sit in the tension between what you were told and what you are beginning to understand. For those of us — from the Ozarks, from the Bible Belt, from any place where queerness has had to learn how to move like water — this work feels intimately familiar. Not because we have seen it before, but because we have lived inside its conditions. Eden doesn’t explain that experience. They build it. From what was torn and left asunder. And if you, the viewer, are willing to move slowly enough — if you let yourself be redirected and submerged — you might begin to recognize something of your own reflection in it. Not clearly. But enough. |
Poetry from where the current slows:
banishing the woman of smoke
by Eden Imrie The house split clean at the river’s bend, timbers sighing relief like lungs torn open. And she took her half-- her tongue, a blade dulled by vanity gashed shadows in the rafters She had sown cruelty in a house built by gentler hands. Rooms filled with her spite, black and corrosive. I gathered her malice like thorns in my palms, unknowingly carrying her ache until it bloomed into curse. In the stillness after ruin, I turned the ache over in my hands, listened for its breath, felt for its pulse, and named it witchcraft. I laid the ache upon the altar, small, heavy, and humming, adorning it with salt, ash, and dripping wax. The flame bent toward release smoke curled into cursive spell-ing out that witch once held me a dancing mirage in the gaslight “Let reflections turn against themselves where echoes rot long before they surface. May lies loosened come home to swarm, a buzzing mouth singing its own song. I send to the shallow end of every dream, the illusion of what we could not deliver.” I stand where the current slows, and I pour her from my body like spoiled milk, shapeless the night breathes — and the hearth remembers how to hold its heat. the desire to drink two cups of poison by Eden Imrie our eyes lock-- and i know everything about the nothing that isn’t said, like a current passing beneath still water. our eyes lock-- and we touch as the crowd kicks up the wind, a hurried hello, our orbits sucked up and scattered freely across the choppy see. our eyes lock-- and our tides wrestle each other, pulling and receding, an approach diverted. our eyes lock-- like two sharks tonguing the water, taste-testing the same salt, adapting to the temperature. our eyes lock-- and two duct-taped cups of poison, glitter across the floor-- an attempt to linger, a bait i’ll dream of drinking when i’m alone, quenching my shadow’s thirst for potential. i see you at home, in the background of someone else’s video i gulp down it cuts you off at the waist, but i know the way you lean-- you don’t move, but it loops again and again, like we did, again and again, until I stop gulping again and again, i shut my phone-- again and again, i pull out my vibrator, the hum a current returning me to myself, again and again. her before by Eden Imrie I heard her laughter before her, echoing her back to me and her before her before her before her before your birthday by Eden Imrie the autumn air is crisp like warm apple pie and leaves rustle in my ears as i look up at your starlight eyes Their angle this time of year reminds me of you i still like to dip in the creeks & rivers when the days don’t graze pass 70 the chill hits my skin and i graze my own goosebump arms the way i did that first year you became the stars she loves her, I can not help it by Eden Imrie She grabs my hand, tucking it into her pocket I feel the warmth of her thigh through the thin lining and my lips press hurriedly into hers as we twirl out of balance rolling down the hill and into the bushes that line the field honeysuckle drapes around me as I awaken Again, just a dream I wrap my arms around, my hands grazing my sides I feel the warmth of my thigh through the cotton bedding And my lips release slowly, a sighing breath as I twirl into balance Rolling through sheets and into the shower, a green cocoon Steam rolls over my shoulders as I awaken Again, just a dream Ozark finger trap by Eden Imrie We fought without touching but through texts never sent as our pain twisted all purpose like an Ozark finger trap We argued without tongues but through glances never met As our fear ran the show like an Ozark finger trap We raged war in silence where our blows hit through avoidance as our hearts yearned for care like an Ozark finger trap We let go in dreams where our touch is slow & gentle losing each knot, releasing like an Ozark finger trap It’s June but we glow like October by Eden Imrie i feel the warmth as sun hits my lovers’ face tracing our curves and grooves by the ridges of heat and cool valleys between cheeks i taste bubbly pink champagne i slurp from the stream as we sit like fairies do – yapping, giggling gurgles i hear seven springs dripping as quickly as our heartbeats drumming soil and dirt loosening into mist at the base of the falls i touch pink brown folded lips hand dripping in more than waterfall – the bursting of a damn, splashing, laughing to the stone floor rooting myself in the mouth of a sycamore my affair with the mist by Eden Imrie The first morning she appeared, the fog had not yet lifted from the creek-- the air thick with the scent of apple rain. It moved like breath over water, rising in slow folds, catching the light. From it seeped a woman-- as if born from mist-- barefoot, her dress clinging translucent to her form. I thought she was a trick of the light until she knelt by the bank and placed her palms flat to the current, listening for its pulse. For her, the water stilled, hearing a message beyond words. I froze in wonder. when she looked up, her eyes were riverstone—soft, marbled, knowing of my life before Eye fixed, she came closer. The air thickened with the faint sweetness of something always wild. The river seems to tilt toward us-- a current enveloping two bodies that have learned turbulence from rivers. Her fingertips trace the white hairs on my goosebumped arms, spinning bubbles that rise like minnows breaking in quick flashes of silver. When my eyes flutter open, The sun is hot on my skin, and hard shadows cast into the holler. I sense her all around me, invisibly stitched into the air At dusk, we meet again beneath the falls. The roar is constant-- a heartbeat turned outward. Mist clings to our skin light fractures into prisms across her cheeks. She tilts her face upward, and for a breath I feel the world tipping, Spray rushing, soaks us both. her laughter ripples through it echoing off the bluffs to settle in forgotten crevices. Deep in the hills, we follow the river’s secrets upstream. We climb through sycamore roots until we crouch on moss at the edge of a swimming hole. The water gleams dark as ink, holding the starlight in its surface. She slips from the rocks and eases into the pool. As she wades in, the surface folds open, catching her reflection and swallowing it whole. I follow The water shocks my skin-- She turns toward me, moonlight caught her riverstone eyes, her hair slicked to her skin like silver silk. She moves like whispers, the current brushing us closer, the stars trembling above. The earth itself holds its breath. A moment before we touch, two horns grow into shadow, wrapping arms around her until her heather greys turn charcoal black. Choking on the air, her lips pierce mine. Not a kiss I gasp, backbending, tumbling through the strata-- head over heels, over head-- the warm swaddle of my mother’s embrace as water gushes into my lungs. Time folds into tidalpools, pulling me deeper, cycling past trembling thresholds, close enough to glimpse shimmers of moments met and missed. Sipping air, I breathe from passing bubbles. Fish nibble at my softened skin, leaving quiet signatures. And I forget the language of the sun as my eyes turn white from looking inward. I wake on a pebble peninsula, slowly drying in the rising sun Fossil-marks bloom along my skin from my head to my feet. My shadow rises with me, Hand in hand, we leave the creek. just single & living by Eden Imrie Does everybody think the river wants to take them? They see a woman alone, curves carved by self-respect, and assume the current is hungry. And I’m just single & living, wandering the way water does when she’s wading through her own wonder. Welcoming to wives who don’t mistake my warmth for a hand slipping between their rings. I smile-- they retreat. I listen-- they vanish. Apparently friendship is a dangerous sport. And I’m just single & living, drifting toward friends. I laugh too loudly at their jokes, smile without calculation of flirtation, and the whole forest blushes as the wives tense, the husbands stiffen-- unaware of the sudden flood warning. My body casts rumors the way trees cast shade-- just from existing in the sun. And I’m just single & living, bantering along the banks of friendship, lapping at the shorelines without needing. A siren only by rumor-- I giggle into the evening, slipping home alone into the dark, hush of blankets wrapped around my pulsing form. Does everybody take adorning natural beauty as a flare thrown for someone else? They see a woman tending her own reflection, shining like river quartz in the sun, and assume it’s a beckon for their own belonging. And I’m just single & living. I skip to my own pace: enmeshed in my skin, sensitive to the breeze, offering partners pockets of playfulness deep enough to share the silver minnows’ secrets. Behind me, unseen-- wives worrying, wives wondering, wives thinking I’m wanting. And I’m just single & living. As ghosting eyes magnetize, following me around the room, I stay blind to anything but the steady pulse of living. the dead drift moves over almost-friendships, cast like skipped stones Too hesitant to touch the shining shore And I’m just single & living, with eyes only for the living single. |
