Artist Statement
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.
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.