BLESSED BUT STRESSED A Concept Calendar by Javier Alejandro Cerrada

BLESSED BUT STRESSED is a time-based photographic work exploring the unexpected images that emerge from queer lived experience. Conceived under the guiding premise of “images I never expected to take,” the calendar presents a curated selection of photographs created throughout 2025. 

Across twelve months, the work moves through shifting emotional registers—intimacy, vulnerability, humor, desire, and the quotidian. These images, simultaneously candid and composed, trace the layered texture of queer existence: its tenderness, its tensions, its moments of play, and its subtle acts of resistance. 

By framing a calendar as an accessible art object, the project invites viewers to encounter photography in a slow, domestic rhythm—month by month, page by page. In doing so, it transforms an everyday functional object into a reflective space, asking us to consider how we inhabit time, memory, and identity. 

BLESSED BUT STRESSED offers an artwork that is both personal and universal, inviting contemplation whether displayed in the home, the studio, or any space where the quiet viewing of images becomes part of daily life.