William Hohe

William Hohe (b. 2002) is a multidisciplinary artist whose practice bridges photography, video, installation, sculpture, and fashion. Rooted in a fascination with how objects carry memory, identity, and relational histories, their work examines the intersections of queerness, archive, and material culture. Drawing from personal and collective memory, William transforms photographs and found objects into immersive installations that reimagine space, time, and the mundane as sites of queered narrative and transformation.

Their work is deeply informed by their upbringing as a queer and nonbinary individual in a conservative, Catholic suburb. Through autobiographical fiction and performative self-portraiture, William explores how faith, domesticity, and suburbia shape identity—and how those systems can be reinterpreted. Influenced by artists such as Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Nan Goldin, and Hal Fischer, they use personal archives and queer semiotics to construct counter-narratives that resist dominant cultural codes. Their images often move between staged intimacy and digital ephemera, from family albums to hookup apps, from roadside landscapes to curated fashion tableaux.

At the core of their practice is a photographic approach that challenges the static nature of the image. Guided by ideas from Susan Sontag and Jacques Derrida, William treats the photograph not just as representation, but as an object of transformation—something to be collected, circulated, and reassembled. Their installations blur boundaries between fact and fiction, inviting viewers to confront the complexities of memory, presentation, and identity.

William holds a dual BFA in Photography and BS in Advertising with minors in Art History and Business from the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. They are the founder of the Circular Fashion Expo and former director of The Fashion Network (TFN), a student-run fashion organization. Their current research investigates queer storytelling in digital spaces, the architecture of family archives, and the aesthetics of objecthood in the American Midwest. Through this, William creates work that is both deeply personal and resonant with broader cultural tensions.