STATEMENT OF WORK

In gay years past, say 50 years ago, it was not uncommon for someone to pour a bottle of poppers into a fog machine, filling the room with the industrial odor of the popular inhalant in the pursuit of melting bodies, blurring vision. I have only found this anecdote through word of mouth, appearing sparsely in writing with no clear reference; though which reference would prove satisfactory I do not know. I long to see a fog machine with crystalized poppers in the tank, rank with the smell, though I know such an object is unlikely to have survived. 

 My current work traces the materials of an American queerness through bits of photographic ephemera, manufactured in my studio. Party lights and lasers often found in gay bars become tools for mark making, a discotheque inside of a darkroom. The architecture of pleasure becomes apparent through photographic processes; creating an index of feeling out of body. How do we use the materials of being queer - whether it be crisco or silicone lube - to reach something (somewhere) transcendent? How does the camp, the kitsch, the ‘in poor taste’ amount to something utopian? It is by doing and using these things which takes them beyond a gay semiotics, and instead somewhere visceral and somatic.