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I am a disabled queer/trans interdisciplinary artist working across mediums including sculpture, performance, photography, installation and textile. Important to all of my work is the assertion of material animacy. The relationship between myself and the materials I work with is deeply collaborative and feels interpersonal. This practice resonates with a larger body of scholarship in disability and critical relationality studies, recognizing the possibility and somatic features of imagination and queer/crip temporality. Across different mediums, my work explores the possibilities of different objects and materials, illuminating their aliveness as they exist now, and in my imagination as I work to transform and manipulate their physical presence.

My work is broadly concerned with themes of embodiment, queer sexuality, and the ways that marginal bodies move through and thrive in a milieu of spaces. My practice is informed not only by being queer and leather, but by being in the complicated community spaces that are by and for queer and leather folk. My time in these spaces has offered me access to interpersonal relational structures that I have adopted in my art practice, where materials become my partners. Aesthetically, my work reflects a visual vernacular of deviant sexuality and queer love. I am interested in taking up what it means to be in a body that the state and the empirical core deem controllable. I am focused on surveillance, carcerality, policing, and detachment from natural resources as violations of autonomy and agency. My work asserts rather than inquires. It refuses to disconnect the mind from flesh, offering material explorations as a generous landing place where grief, arousal, rage, and other bodily sensation get to be visualized and witnessed.

Education

Bachelor’s of Mixed Media Arts & Ethnography

University of Massachusetts Amherst

Expected Fall 2026

Exhibitions

Much of Osten’s material explorations are rooted in the aesthetics of queer S/M subcultures, where Frank has had the opportunity of performing and teaching rope bondage across the country. His work has been shown at VoxBody Studio in San Francisco, published in (In)Decent Magazine (Issue #2), and installed for THUS LOVE’s music video On The Floor. Osten’s work is also informed by his years of experience working in rural harm reduction and community organizing- and the visual language of substance use and community care can be seen throughout his work.

Last Updated 24.10.37

FRANK OSTEN

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