An Exercise Manual for the Locker-Room-Cum-Church, Notes from the Devout

2024 - (ongoing)

This series employs staged dioramas constructed through collage, theatrical lighting, and abrupt shifts in scale to build an alternative space that hovers between the locker room and the church. These environments are not depictions of either site but assembled hybrids, constructed from their shared visual grammar of discipline and devotion. Altar-like arrangements, congested interiors, bodies and objects stacked, lit, and held. The locker room and the church each present themselves as moral, corrective, and upright institutions; my images borrow that posture while exposing what it contains. Both sites are saturated with bodily proximity, ritualized exposure, and coded forms of reverence, and it is this saturation that structures the scenes I build. They taught me how to look—how to hold my gaze, how to regulate attention, how to desire under supervision. For my purposes, they remain simultaneously sacred and profane, rigidly homophobic and deeply homoerotic.

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In these spaces, the management of the male body is paramount. Nudity and uniform operate together, tightening and releasing in sequence. Repetition, surveillance, and instruction generate intimacy without permission. Touch is permitted—often required—while desire is officially denied. Bodies are gathered, stripped, aligned, observed, corrected. The wrong glance or the wrong contact is immediately punished. An athlete may loudly denounce queerness while standing naked among other men, his body scrutinized, admired, measured, compared. This contradiction is not accidental. It is structural. Desire does not emerge in spite of discipline but through it. Systems are erected to contain it—erect, impressive, and deeply invested in preventing desire from becoming anything else.

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The images do not treat the locker room or the church as sites of trauma, but as spaces where desire was trained, redirected, and rehearsed. That training, however, failed. Fantasy persists. These scenes are not memories rendered intact but fantasies reconstructed from debris, staged like elaborate daydreams frozen just before initiation. Everything is arranged and ready. Nothing advances. What animates the work is a distinctly teenage form of longing: desire experienced before fluency, permission, or the confidence to act against the norm. Attraction circulates without resolution, learning to attach itself to fragments rather than whole bodies. When desire cannot move forward, it settles. It presses. It fixates. It finds substitutes.

Scale performs this suspension. Dollhouse furniture collides with monumental underwear. Athletic gear swells into relic. Objects loom larger than the body meant to use them. The environments are overbuilt, overlit, and overdetermined—too much structure for too little action. The stage remains set, rigid with anticipation, convinced that something must eventually occur.

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Feet recur throughout the series as one such substitute. The foot is among the most widely recognized sites of fetish, frequently discussed in psychoanalysis but articulated much earlier in biblical language, where the foot operates as a euphemism for genitalia. Here, the foot becomes something else again: a relic, a stand-in for an encounter perpetually deferred. Desire lingers there without consequence. I repeatedly depict myself worshipping a single gold and blue Adidas football cleat, inhaling the residue of a body that is no longer present. The object endures while the body that once wore it does not. The chance for a physical encounter has ended, but the fantasy remains intact—available, portable, held in place by the cleat’s materiality.

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The repeated figure throughout the series is my own body. These works function as self-portraits, though not in the tradition of confession or revelation. I place my fat body at the center of scenes that have historically excluded it, disciplined it, or rendered it invisible. In the locker room and the church, fatness is read as failure: a failure of control, devotion, masculinity, or will. Here, that same body is nude, desiring, devotional, and unapologetically present. It is not corrected, improved, or redeemed. It is allowed to want.

By repeating myself across the series in nearly identical poses, I refuse both transformation and transcendence. My body functions as a fixed axis within the image, a stabilizing mass around which excess is arranged.. It does not resolve. It does not get better. It persists. Desire is not displaced onto thinner, more acceptable figures. It remains embedded in my own flesh, insisting on its legitimacy despite every system that taught me otherwise. Fatness here is not only a body type but a temporal condition: a body trained to wait, to hesitate, to be told it will be desirable later—if ever.

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This waiting is not melancholic so much as paralyzed. The series repeats the same poses and the same objects as the environments shift, turning desire into ritual. I always reach the threshold where something could happen, but it never does. The images are not scenes of excess or release, but of private fixation rendered at monumental scale. They stage the wish that something might have happened when I was younger, but didn’t—because I was afraid, because I did not yet know how. Action circulates around me rather than culminating in encounter. It remains held at a distance, suspended, withheld. Desire here is not consumptive. It is architectural.

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The works operate like stages where fantasies are carefully blocked and endlessly rehearsed. Athletic gear, bottles of lubricant, mirrors, columns, vintage pinups, pornographic fragments, Renaissance frescoes, and devotional clutter accumulate into dense, artificial interiors. Objects refuse their proper scale; nothing settles. Everything is arranged with the conviction that a release is imminent.

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What remains legible across the series is an unabashed arousal that persists in spaces where it was never meant to exist. These works attend to covert glances, disciplined bodies, hidden erections, and private rituals of longing. Desire appears here as a mode of survival: repetitive, theatrical, unresolved. A devotion once practiced in secret, now staged in public—still never allowed to touch.