Visual Work
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Visual Work Under Construction: Dozens of newer images to be added November 2006
I recycle mass media and popular cultural images in my art. My art serves as personal commentary and social critique. I often explore the political and social nature of gender (especially masculinity), sexuality and personal memory in my art. Focusing mainly on the male body, I examine the play and impact of gender and sexuality on my personal beliefs and life experiences. In the "Pleasures of--Series," I utilize memory and imagination to explore the simultaneous pains and pleasures of growing up gay in a straight world. The intent of this work is to look at the multiple dimensions of particular life experiences. I reconfigure and re-remember these experiences as neither totally painful nor totally pleasurable. They become part of much more complex personal landscape that I now see as a necessary part of my continued development as a family member, community member, artist, teacher, etc. Pleasure becomes an empowering and constructive way of recognizing all my life experiences as integral to my development as a person. I grew up working-class in a small industrial city on the western shores of Lake Michigan. Was supposed to get a "good" job and settle in the community. Wasn't supposed to go to college and become a teacher. (I taught elementary art for ten years.) Wasn't supposed to go back and get a Ph. D. As an academic and an artist, I struggle to write and make art that reflects the various dimensions of what it means to be gay, male, educator and artist, living and teaching in a anxiety-ridden misogynist culture.
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Growing up, I internalized the cultural homophobia--that being different and gay was wrong and perverse. I permitted personal fear and cultural discrimination to hold my imagination and life hostage. After seven years of graduate school, continued psychotherapy and the support of friends and family, I am able to turn around the pain and fear into critical writing and art. I'd like to think that I am making up for lost time. What I lost for so many years through humiliation and cultural and self-imposed homophobia, I am slowly recapturing through my art and writing. Look closely at the words in "The Pleasures of Adolescence." Those are not my words. I offer those words back to a culture that named me. |
Art and writing continue to be important ways for me to tell my stories and witness to my experiences. My professional work, both written and visual, addresses social and political perspectives of marginalized identities. In my art, I recycle mass media and popular cultural images. I use personal and social issues as focal points to reexamine lifelong-held notions I have of art, education, childhood, religion, etc. All of my interests have grown out of my personal experiences as a gay male, artist and educator. Living in a culture that still largely denies death, sex, poverty, gender inequity and race, what Jonathan Silin (1995) terms our "passion for ignorance," I continue to be intrigued how school curricula reflect denial, perpetuate a cultural amnesia and the consequences of such policies for students and teachers.
Silin, J. (1995). Sex, death, and the education
of children: Our passion for ignorance in the age of AIDS.
Columbia University, New York: Teachers College Press.
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| Mother of AIDS/Our Lady of AIDS, 1997; collage, 16" X 20"; All of the virgin iconography relates to my socialization as a Polish Catholic and my (re)reading of the notion of "mother' and "goddess" in relation to lived experiences of sexual identity in the age of AIDS. | The Pleasures of Adolescence (Text above image reads: "The things you learn and the experiences you have in school help to form your personality.") 1998, 16.5" X 11.5"; digital image/collage/poster; digitized health text image adding names endured during adolescence. |
Join the Fight, 1997; collage, 11" X 16"; I utilize stereotypical images of masculinity, the military, and war to engage the viewer in an examination of the multiple dimensions of AIDS and related social issues: violence, complacency, gendered social roles, oppression, and youth. |
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| Madonna in Prayer, 1992; collage, 10.5" X 13.5" |