GENERAL STATEMENT

Qualities of “queerness,” or what one might call “identity,” is a winding course. In my work, attempts to look for an inward “queerness” has found the lens to project outward. There is a fine line between me and we, so little in fact that the personal will undoubtedly volte-face back to the world. This contradiction in “identity,” as presented through art and life, shapes the complex and elegant forms of my work. Objects in the external world of public restrooms, city streets and parks, provide for the subtext of distinct themes in their “queerness.”


Yet for all the qualities of an object maker,-- my obsession with material and a skilled hand-- the manner in which I create requires more than that hand. I must engage in collecting and interpreting the intimacies of anthropological, sociological, cultural and personal queer histories. The task at hand is then to uncloak the noncommunicability of meaning behind these things into understandable and potent imagery. 

CURRENT PROJECT STATEMENT
In 1965, the acclaimed philosopher and political theorist Hannah Arendt penned the title question “Is America By Nature A Violent Society?” The New York Times article now fifty-four years old, reads as if it was ripped from current headlines. Arendt submits American society as an unpredictable outlier given it is a country of multiplicities that cannot possess homogeneous qualities of national character. She states: “If 'like attracts like’ is as natural for human society as ‘birds of a feather flock together,’ one could even say that American society is artificial ‘by nature.’” American society is perhaps the prime example of a global black swan event, an outlier beyond the notions of common expectations and predictability. Our body politic is founded on the paradox of lawful lawlessness to account our triumphs and tribulations of assimilation and alienation. Arendt is correct in the reminder that, “nationalism and racism are not the same,” yet bolstered by the American touchstone of “tolerating a considerable amount of mutual discrimination in society.”

White supremacy in the United States is nothing new, yet most are unsettled when confronted with the antithetical knowledge of rising gay male supremacists. In hindsight, that threshold of social tribalism between white supremacy and white gay male desire is quite synchronous. Both are cultivated on the notion of restoring ones battered powers of positional masculinity, a brotherhood of primal peril. Their existence confounds a clear distinction of the gay male narrative, however artificial in nature, and establishes themselves as the vanguard of the fringe outsider--where the marginalized find warped positions of power. Looking into the darker regions of my community and culture poses a counter to our outfacing marginality, our artificiality. The insular state of communal sexism and racism are secretly rampant, while our seemly fun and camp fetishization of police, the military, and leather clad bad boys, incites the very complex manifestation of homoromanticized masculine power constructs. Where much of queer work celebrates the prerogative of the progressive, I choose to cultivate from the darker regions of and alternate inceptions of our history. Black Swan is an investigation of that perilous threshold of male homo-power and their ascribed loss of masculinity from feminist and queer progressivism. Arendt notes the consequences wherein: “Impotence breeds violence, and the more impotent these white groups feel the greater grows the danger of violence.”