“artist statement”

my artistic practice is about distance, violence, pathos, camp, sexuality, and above all, discomfort.

i want to explore the violence we do to each other, the fear of it hanging over our heads and the actual realized actions. i am interested in how it folds into the other main pillars of my art and why, as violence creates its own complicated ley lines of subconscious boundary and value. it meshes very nicely, of course, with sexuality. i am trans and gay. my sexuality is a cornerstone of my art and my existence. it is also the thing about me that is most likely to get me killed. this makes me angry, for obvious reasons: i want to explore that anger by using the aesthetics of camp and their normative “wrongness” to discomfort and confront the viewer.

in my recent work the way i do this is through the inclusion of mass-produced ceramic figurines. they are objects created without care to exist and elicit emotion. the intended emotion, one can only imagine, was one of reacting to cuteness: fawning. the emotion that more frequently emerges is one of pity. pity, pathos, and the pathetic object are very close concepts to my heart. i believe we turn to believing in the pathetic when violence is too broad and kindness is too far away. i also believe pathos is intrinsically a difficult emotion to handle - it makes the viewer uncomfortable, especially when juxtaposed against other emotions.

i want to ask the viewer questions about how they handle what they feel. i want to threaten their viewpoint but do so with a smile. i want to confront them tenderly. the pieces i make aren’t hard to look at. i don’t want them to be.

in terms of influences, i am beholden to medieval woodcuts, william blake, rene magritte, cassils, alejandro jodorowsky, q hayashida, dennis cooper, etc. some of these are much more obvious than others.