In this series, Kelly works collaboratively with members of Central Arkansas’s LGBTQIA+ community. The work features color portraits of her subjects (made by Kelly) as well as black and white photographs created by them.
The best way to describe the project? “Sometimes, because you care, you’ve got to ask ‘What’s it like growing up queer in Arkansas?’”
This project started when Dafna was searching for a particular ghost of a woman in white.While doing research, she found a quote in Colin Dickey’s pivotal work Ghostland: An American History in Haunted Places: “Ghosts, you could say, flock to women left alone.” This quote resonated with her deeply and allowed her to consider her own personal connections to supernatural stories about those who had departed the mortal coil. It also made her consider how grief has been a consistent state of being for her over the past five years. This work explores what it means to feel haunted and how a ghostly presence is nothing more than our projected desire to see what is lost.