"All I want..." he said, "is thirty seconds"(2022)
“All I want...” he said, “is thirty seconds” (2022) is a recent body of work that utilizes custom, ephemeral 3D renderings and inkjet prints as either finished work or source material to visually inform and complicate the paradoxical permanence of my oil paintings. In this system, I emphasize technology as a tool for direct sensation. Through cyclical processes of embodied construction and destruction, I examine my queer identity to prompt the viewer to question the complexities of self-image and the transgressions of external perception.
As I examine eroticized bodies and environments, I define a slippery call-and-response system of looking that blends primordial and contemporary dreams of homoerotic desire. When classical references are in conversation with queer histories of visual exchange, such as cruising, I create moments of missed glances through body mirroring, compositional cropping, and material erasure. This line of making blurs the line between those who desire and those who are desired. By engaging these questions, I interrogate the experiential stakes of my own queer longing through historical traditions of hiding in plain sight.
While a scream is considered a captured, invisible force in relation to horror, I question what the invisible and unnamable forces that relate to beauty are. Through the embodied process of painting, I examine the disparity between the human hand and the machine to bridge the contradictory nature of forming and losing an identity. As one desires something until the moment they have it, my work eludes identification to illicit dreams that were never one’s own to fulfill. Eternally grasping, never reaching, my work revels in the chase itself.
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