Stasya De Luna has a thing for the moon, and for the tides. In her first public film work, The intimacy of before (2020), the artist fashions a dusk-lit self-portrait: her skin glistens behind bath steam, and the sea acts as the short film’s baseline soundtrack, waves lapping at Green’s voiceover narration. “It felt like I was being pulled by a magnet towards the sea,” she says in near-whisper. She’s been sitting with Audre Lorde’s Zami: A New Spelling of My Name (1982) since the start of 2019, and in The intimacy of before, I see echoes of one of the book’s heady passages: “ . . . the ghostly vague light drifting upward from the street competed with the silver hard sweetness of the full moon, reflected in the shiny mirrors of our sweat-slippery dark bodies, sacred as the ocean at high tide.” Green’s film, commissioned by Fotografiska New York, provides a captivating anchor for her first solo museum exhibition, and the show’s title, Brief & Drenching, makes Zami’s influence explicit; it’s lifted from one of the book’s final phrases.

I recently spoke by phone with Green about Brief & Drenching, her ode to portraiture—of the self, of the home (one gallery room is a recreation of her living room), and of the queer communities that make both self and home most legible. From Pur·suit (2018), a studio portrait series-turned-playing card deck of fifty-four queer womxn and trans, nonbinary, and gender-nonconforming people; to a birthing stool handcrafted by Green; to her snapshots at New York City’s historically LGBTQ-centered Jacob Riis beach, Green’s work seeks out a soft place for the transient self to land and wander. As Green intones over the short film’s narration, in a quiet murmur that drenches the whole exhibition, “Is it too much to want a tender and complete intimacy?”

Nicole Acheampong: One of the pieces in the exhibition that’s stuck with me is the video installation The intimacy of before. I’d love to know more about your filmmaking process. What drew you to that medium?

Naima Green: About four years ago, right after the 2016 election, I had just started my MFA program at ICP-Bard and was taking a video course. I was fresh out of a breakup, fresh off of the despair behind the election, and I made a video just with my tripod. It was me in my apartment; it was almost like a sketch video. The concept behind it was around grief and loss and using these pearls with the same action that appears in The intimacy of before: pulling the pearls out of a menstruating vagina, eating the pearls, and almost choking on them. At the time, it wasn’t anything that I wanted to share or show, but I knew that it was an idea I wanted to work on again, and in a different way. So, this time, I worked with collaborator Jessie Levandov. We filmed in July over the course of two days, and it was just me and her.