Hold Me, Harder emerged from a forced dislocation—a time when I had lost access to my studio just as I had begun to reclaim it after months of quarantine. Suddenly, I was working at a kitchen table. An improvised routine, daily drawings of teddy bears, became an extended meditation on an unseen terror of losing one's creative footing and an attempt at personal care.
 
The drawings themselves are modest, rendered in water-based marker, using a limited palette of yellow and shades of blue. For exhibition, the works were given oversized frames and matted with beveled cutouts, configuring a portal of sorts. Each drawing was purposefully placed off-center, pushed into a corner of its frame. The presentation space was layered with vinyl wall decals depicting India ink drawings recalling children’s storybooks, hinting at a world of mysterious figures, fragmented narrative, and suspended play. A small maquette of the show, a “show-within-a-show,” propped in a corner on tiny toys. A text about my grandfather’s death introduced grief—private, unresolved, and difficult to name.
 
Hold Me, Harder staged a queer gesture. Rather than claim the center, it presented edges and margins as the space for resolution.  It asked not to be experienced lightly, but with intensity—with a recognition that tenderness, too, requires strength.