ABSTRACT
Chapter 4 examines Chase’s depiction of a queer-cultivated environment through a nexus of their references to flowers, plants, crops, the weather, and farming. Gender nonconforming themself, Chase’s representations of individuals enjoying varieties of clothing, mannerisms, and interests traditionally coded as masculine or feminine offer valuable examples of how US artists and US publics at large are changing their understanding of nature and the natural as well as their understanding of the interactions between nature and the human body and psyche. Since Chase sets many of their paintings in human-made structures, often amid the pleasures and the pains of an urban environment, flowers, plants, and seeds manifest still more noticeably in their scenes, with the natural world continuing to evolve and to thrive despite industrial obstacles. In effect, Chase uses such flowers and leaves as multifaceted symbols, carefully shaped, to detail the fragile and yet revitalizing joys of a messy human growth, or the cultivation of a human nature. Chase’s allusions to an evolving development among plants and humans presents a valuable challenge to mythically naturalized, too pruned conceptions of gender, sexuality, and race.
