'Land of Enchantment' - Badlands, No. 2 Print

Thank you or visiting my studio. I work primarily in painting, photography and video installation. The focus of my work is the nature of the erotic, as it provides interesting pathways to other core areas of life; spiritual, political, the interwoven relationships between authenticity and artifice, love, desire, mortality, issues of race, gender and sexual identity. The erotic and spiritual seem to have been inextricable throughout human history, as evidenced by our arts, writings and other pieces of the archeological record. That essential link has been significantly weakened in our modern societies throughout he influences of religious suppression, ubiquitous pornography and the isolating effects of our reliance on new technologies for social connection. Much of my work intends to touch that space where the erotic and spiritual may still coexist. Our sexual selves as a thing of matter - our means of reaching a common humanity on the most foundational of levels. Folded into this is the interplay of the artificial and the authentic in a culture that increasingly isolates us from those 'real' experiences we most desire. I also often try to incorporate allusions to other works or genres in art history in a way to tie their perspectives on eroticism to our own culture. For example, the painted vases series, which features fetish and also modern pornography imagery, nods to Greek decorative vases from 3,500+ years ago, as well as to the later works of Picasso, Haring and Ai Wei Wei, among others. I’ve been asked the relevance of my subjects’ races / ethnicities in the body of my work (I assume because many of my subjects are not white and I am). Initially I assigned very little meaning to this, except that it is simply a reflection of my own life - my family, friends, people that I meet and find interesting as subjects. In other words But as I think with more clarity about the work as it comes together, I better realize that many layers of context come with the identity of the person who stands as the work’s subject. Are women or men of particular racial groups fetishized in one way or another? Or stereotyped as sexually aggressive, sexually passive, promiscuous, libidinous, unmasculine, etc. Rope play involving an Asian subject may engender a different set of intellectual and emotional responses than a Black subject would, for example.