my current work incorporates sculpture, fashion and photography to generate otherworldly visions that investigate relationships between beauty and power. these images are tools for recreating myself, my queer family, and surrounding reality in a way that lets us transcend the world in which we currently live. this work is a manner of coping, creating momentary realities in which we are beautiful, ok, even powerful, acting as more than ourselves. through sculpture, drag, and the associated picture making i’m looking to construct future selves that we can inhabit right now, fantasy selves that we can grow into.
the work smashes together aesthetic cues from my early adulthood in rural Indiana. here, in a tight-knit miniature gay community, geographic and financial entrapment created a bubble of political isolation, mutual support, and vibrant but secret self-expression. I found a tiny cadre of queer individuals with whom i created a family. we made a domestic sub-reality, joining nearby apartments into a physical microcosm and generating a social environment in which we could be safe and creative. this experience is the root of my art practice. when a group of us relocated to Chicago in 2015, I brought leftover feelings of loving tenacity, an unflattering us vs them brand of apocalyptic paranoia and a sticky awareness that all reality is contextual. My artwork has absorbed this and struggles with connections between queerness and toughness, particularly in fashion and self-expression.