Transfigured images of gardens, parks, and other landscapes are central to Walsh’s work, positioned as sites for queer and trans connection. Gathering combines topographic maps of L.A., historic and contemporary ecologies of the northeast banks of the Los Angeles River, and computer-generated representations of flora and fauna, layered with Walsh’s own memory and lived experience. Though rendered anonymous in Gathering, the figures seen throughout are lifted from two sources. Through a process of “archival cruising” (a methodology developed and enacted by many queer historiographers, writers, and activists), Walsh collects resonant details from photographs by gay filmmaker and activist Pat Rocco, who directed and depicted public acts of intimacy in 1960s and 1970s Los Angeles. In intergenerational conversation with Rocco’s project, the artist also includes selections from photoshoots of friends in rest and repose, staged in Walsh’s garden.

Light shimmers in Gathering, reflected and diffused through visible planes of color and texture that intersect thecomposition. These forms act as mirrors and windows, interrupting continuity and reorienting our perspective. Walsh’s work confounds legibility, oscillates between vibrancy and concealment, and offers ways of seeing that shift and unfold. Moving fluidly between the referential and the imagined, Gathering points to cycles of sacrifice and survival, erasure and emergence, while approaching what theorist José Esteban Muñoz terms “a then and there” rooted in radical desire and possibility.