Painting

Artificial Tao

slippery stances. Paper divides. Paper is a false Tao itself. Achievement markers, money game, a hustler’s bandwidth. Life is death and death life. Life composite: color, tears, and fig leaf hidings. With seductive slippings the helm - unmarked, interwoven, a screwtape’s game. A lowercase ‘s’ is all that deserving. seething scarlet, electric vibrancy. Desensitize-Jam-Convert. After the Ball with sequin shrapnel. Are we both at war with normalcy?

BIND

“What binds us?” became a game of self-operation. Undoing my stitching and I found that my corners were laced with copper with luminescence gifted from the divine.

Dead/end relationships. dead end. Does it spore new life like mycelium? For you, unlikely. Gutted, knotted knots. Would you except something pretty to embody pain? Beauty from Pain. darling//disease. The reality is this piece is ongoingly unfinished… it was supposed to hold your figure. Embody my care. For now, I do self-portraits, and I’m okay with that. BLOW. bLOW. blow of a hairdryer, silence filler sanctuary. the hum of dot dot dot. electro-hymn of time cataclysmic.

boxtop

Questioning foundations, "why do you believe what you believe?", apologetics, the divine, textured love, creation intervention, blinded thoughts.

*featured UK publication 'Peace in the Valley Anthology'

dividen series

Grey-zoned, looping, wedged in between, trenched, sepia grass side, sunder, rend, divorce - the beginnings of my delve into the praxis of my work ‘divide of self’. Rooted//rutted in identity, time, pursuance, + dogma. Where are your divides//have you built bridges?

East of Eden

In conjunction to my movement research for my next choreography project, ‘salt + soot’, ‘East of Eden’ centered on the confliction of identification. Conjoining imagery from the ‘Join or Die’ the revolutionary cartoon and slogan of the thirteen American colonies, and the seven deadly sins listed in the Bible. With gesso mapped in the prospected perimeter of Eden, gay glitter oozes from the seven cuts of the flesh-like interior of the snake, bringing to point if it is in one’s nature or to be of choice to be gay. Laced and intertwined from the front and back the serpent takes on what is east.

Eat Peach

“Are you practicing with what you preach or with what you eat?” scandalously centerfold to the work, ‘Eat Peach’, this saying emplores the contradictions within my identifying community while expressing my difficulties in simple acts, as in dating. A ‘breakthrough’ in regards to an acquired artistic skill of sewing, seaming for the first time plastic sheeting and canvas, and glass neon work. Produced through a scholarship to the Brooklyn glasswork community warehouse and education center, UrbanGlass, I blew and constructed the xenon filled tubing which drapes the upper righthand corner, immersing the painting in lavender, filtering from the back through the plastic. Dually filtering the light, the plastic ghosts and reveals the architecture of the tubing and stretcher bars, as a subtle metaphor for the unseen.

Ether

Volatile liquid. Organic compound. Beyond the clouds. Musical atmosphere. Rarefied substance.

GRID

Within my research of the term ‘pinkwash’, it led me to common terminology of the AIDS epidemic, where GRID was the initial name for the immune deficiency. Working in a squared geometric form, the abstraction centers on a cellular-like form of suspended copper flakes. The work interplays in what is man-made to what is a natural occurrence.

lavender love

how deep do you love? do you love yourself with that same depth? what is your capacity for intimacy? reflective love. does it sparkle/emit/radiate/shimmer? or is it blinding and fierce? soft as fresh petals, raw like nude canvas. lavender disaster. copper memories later aged with patina romanticism. see how that love ages. pressed copper florals as carbonite Han Solo. solo quarantine days. love letter to future lover. too ripe?

My first self-sewn painting, explored during spring quarantine-2020.

Spilt T

Thinking about contradictions amongst my religious communities, the hierarchy of sin- or lack thereof, New York slang, subjectively sexual content, physical attraction on a carnal level, white lies from silver slick tongues, the glint of gossip, and the cascading of events which took place over a couple of years both in Tucson and New York, with great pauses until the next mark felt smart and logical. With long overdue fruition this work articulates the praxis of my work, taboo identification as a queer religious man.

mrots

prussian thalo’s, nature’s halo’s, water-treading in life’s seas. What’s on your horizon line? neon cotton-candy skies, ether sanctuary, escape escapades. I can’t float.

Thou Shall Not

The painting, Thou Shall Not, gages a critical look into balancing the true nature of one's dogma with an established belief system. In my first solo exhibition, 1.48.116, I explored a physical embodiment of the divide surrounding LGBTQ matters, specifically with relational and religious concerns. This work also holds the first exploration in seaming my canvases, interrupting the viewer’s gaze and embroidering my canvases with copper wire. In recent affairs, the painting just was shown and sold in the exhibition, the ‘Inside Job’, through Christie’s auction house.

Z-Axis

Looking from the perspective of depth, Z-Axis considers time, human connections, the heavenly realm, and memories’ ability to Horcrux themselves to objects. Dust to dust or sublime sovereignty. Solidarity. Solidarity. Solidarity.

*Recently featured in the United Nation’s exhibition ‘Global Conversation’ to have art lead in facilitating humanitarian conversations of our most pressing issues, and in the UK publications: ‘The Working Artist’, ‘Peace in the Valley Anthology'

Water Lilies

sea of psychedelics, Monet/mushroom dreams, softness as a weapon, acid energy, architecture of clouds, nature’s innate design, color’s daily journey, shadow structure, how ebb & flow infiltrates, bliss states, + past lovers.