Integrated visual arts graduate student Natalie Deam will present the “Tender Nests” exhibition for her master of fine arts thesis. Her work will be on display Monday, April 14 through Thursday, April 17, in Gallery 181 in the College of Design.

Her exhibition explores the queer ecology of the Midwest Anthropocene. Inspired by the often-overlooked queerness of Midwestern ecosystems, her work situates these beings within the era of climate change, noting the precarity of species and ecosystems on the brink, and the collapse of traditional borders between the natural and unnatural, the human and non-human, the local and the global. She works with queerness both as a subject of representation, illustrating queer forms of reproduction and sexual transition, as well as a creative practice: rejecting straight orientations and unified surfaces, creating camouflage to evoke the idea of queer passing or flagging, and focusing on the multispecies tangles that complicate heteronormative readings of identity, origin, and evolution.

A closing reception will be held from 5–7 p.m. Thursday, April 17.