Artifacts of the Waters of Time

Ours is a history of estrangement, belonging
only to closets and china cabinets
subject of an antique life, precious
kept away to only be looked upon,
or broken.
 
A lineage, in memoriam for the lost,
and to build the future we must look back,
down the stream of Duane, Dugdale, Mapplethorpe,
Wilde, the masters of the Renaissance,
the forgotten youth, and the sun. 
 
Perform the resurrection, become a specter
Ariel or Puck, a fairy creature in blue
working some magic to recall the past
unite with the present, and raise us up
to the sun, the moon, to our future. 

These selected works from my senior studio thesis exhibition "In More Ways Than One" represents a culmination of my experience with the Art & Art History program at Dickinson College. Throughout the studio process I have been exploring a variety of queer subjects from St. Sebastian to Polari, Mapplethorpe, and beyond. While I have attempted to explore voyeurism with my work most of it has developed into exhibitionism with a veil. In this way the image is given power over the viewer. To exist in society as a queer body is to always be under the public gaze. Constantly redefined and restrained, we are in a seemingly eternal battle of resistance, both fetishized and estranged. In some ways to be queer is to be a specter, tied to a place or community yet not completely a part of this world. Thus I have been exploring queer artists and themes across decades, attempting to discover coherent connections in order to create a queer zeitgeist, a collective body of experiences traversing time and space.

Identity plays an integral, though not always apparent, role in an artist’s work. Is it invasive, the prying eye of the viewer? Are we allowed to make assumptions without accurate information? Perhaps. The death of the author, the artist, becomes drowned out by the incessant noises of society, a history forgotten. This erasure is also a cultural phenomenon, for to be queer is to always be subject to this scrutiny and shift from an enigma to a phantom, a specimen, a mental disease, and now somewhere in between pervert and person, something outside of existence. This work represents one of many stories of queer identity, presenting a lineage from the eras of the Classical, Renaissance, Victorian, and AIDS Crisis of the 1980s: four distinct points of creation and resurrection of style and portraiture.