Sarah Bastress makes compositions populated by queer people and creatures from rural America found in various states of both aggressive and tender play. Most of her paintings are self-contained narratives ruminating on her own body and how it relates to other bodies. Full of queer excitement, visual puns, and a healthy dose of self-deprecation, the scenes in her paintings are born out of the confusion and longing of the pandemic era, having become even more preposterous, surreal, and ambiguous since. Bastress’s bodies are full of possibilities, as they intentionally portray explicit imagery and signifiers that either add up to joy or menace, although without drawing any firm conclusions.