Meg Turner invites us to reimagine the symbols of power, sex, gender, and wealth that advertising uses to seduce us into cycles of consumption and labor, and to reclaim them as tools for fantasy, rest, and celebration.

WET vol.2 is a love letter to the landscapes that live within this speculative world of queer maximalism: spaces she has built with her community in swimming holes, backyard pools, illicit gay beaches, on the roadside, in bedrooms, and under the open sky. This artist’s book, printed by hand and assembled as a stitched pamphlet in the format of a large-scale vintage photo magazine, brings together 27 of Turner’s photographs made with the 19th-century wet-plate collodion process. The photos span across the book’s 22 photogravure-printed pages, with silkscreened text on the cover and colophon. Foldout pages keep horizontal photographs wide, immersing the viewer in an environment one might not expect on a road trip through Louisiana. It is a dreamscape of signage, with anti-ICE and abortion rights messages glowing under a Lisa Frank-inspired sky, living alongside a retelling of Botticelli’s Birth of Venus with a trans woman rising from the waters recently known as the Gulf of Mexico. WET vol.2 celebrates mutual aid and sexual delight and is a record of a communal fantasy, a eulogy for the past, and a proposal for a queer future.

Book Price: $1200
Shipping: $105 (S/H + insurance)
Total: $1,305.00