Studying distance, control, and power within human-human relationships is necessary if artmaking is to fully inhabit its metamorphic potential. Therefore, my work spotlights and upends the pillars of relationship and difficulty. I am interested in spaces where order and obscenity are negotiated, what Lewis Hyde calls “dirt-work.” Difficult art is dirt-work. A self-defined pervert, I consider it my responsibility to create work that requires these negotiations, as the bravery it takes to have them is the bravery we need to create new world(s).

 

Relationship, order, and obscenity are my main concerns, and, while I engage with any media or discipline as long as it serves the research, I see patterns arise. My drawings are typically figurative and focus on ambiguity: what is violence, love, consent, dissent? Why do these things so often look alike? I prioritize materials and mark-making that are bodily and high affect, as in When I’m This Close. In pursuing Francis Bacon’s “brutality of fact” and Deleuze and Guattari’s rhizome, I look to emphasize an unflinching approach to materiality and form that mirrors the complexities of the body—especially the transsexual body—and lived experience.

 

To bring the body to the fore, I often engage with saliva. I use it as a multifaceted metaphor for relationship and queerness, especially in this era of trans panic and pandemic, and it shows up in all of my work eventually, regardless of discipline. In my time-based work, I notice returns to the confrontation of hypocrisy and the notion of accumulation: of events, of marks, of interventions. This is exemplified in pieces like Telling the Future Through a Portal, which portrays spit from a great height as climate anxiety. Performance underlines that relationship is not something “arrived” at: like Erich Fromm’s definition of love, it is a constant practice.

 

Finally, my pedagogical practice is inextricable from my understanding of myself as a creator. If I have a place in a lineage of artists, I must also engage in passing on my experience to artists after me. I’m interested in ways to accessibly introduce the arts and make them relevant to any student, regardless of their major (or, indeed, whether they are even in a college). Creation is a human need/activity. I find it necessary in my pedagogical practice to describe my own work and explore others’ in ways that are not hyper-didactic. Rather, my goal is to create an approach that resides in the intersection of demystifying, critical thinking, and re-mystifying.