ARTIST STATEMENT

I work with queer ephemera: love letters, pornography, remnants of sexual encounters, bodily traces, and unreliable memories. These materials live on the margins. They are easy to misplace, easy to dismiss, and rarely granted the dignity of preservation. I am interested in what happens when they are treated instead as serious cultural matter—as evidence, as archive, as scaffolding for new worlds. My work insists that pleasure and ecstasy are not just sensual concerns, but political ones.

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My earliest training was in experimental theatre, in the directorial lineage of Bertolt Brecht. There, I learned to think of art as a double agent: it should seduce and educate. That logic still structures my practice. My work is shiny, excessive, and erotic—but it is never empty. I rely on seduction as the delivery system. The longer you stay and engage, the more you are asked to think. My work with theatre and performance also gave me my obsession with worldbuilding. I don’t make art to escape reality; I make art to rehearse alternatives.

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An encounter with Punchdrunk’s Sleep No More as a teenager clarified this for me. Punchdrunk’s reimagination of abandoned buildings into totalizing, navigable worlds—where narrative is encountered through movement, proximity, and choice—revealed how spectatorship could be transformed into participation, and even conspiracy. I employ similar strategies. Their participatory logic, which is distinctly Brechtian, continues to shape how I think about audiences. I want viewers inside the work to not experience it as abstract affect but to be implicated, mobilized, and transformed.

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Worldbuilding has also informed my longstanding engagement with the work of John O’Reilly. O’Reilly’s use of collage as a citational practice—assembling fragments to construct a queer historical consciousness—offered me a method for building lineage where none had been officially sanctioned. My early collages and photomontages worked this way, treating reference as a form of desire. The Acrobatics of the Divine, a nearly one-hundred-foot photomontage, extended this approach through the queer histories of flowers, such as the hyacinth, which emerged from the love Apollo had for Hyacinthus. These works used the past as a way of finding the future: stacking citations and references until a world cohered through the fondling of paper and sticky white glue.

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More recently, I have shifted from flat collage to the construction of dioramas, which I photograph and re-photograph to produce elaborate spatial fictions. Printed at architectural scale—often nine by twelve feet or larger—these images lean into trompe-l’oeil traditions. I want the images to feel like they were torn from palaces or chapels, illicitly removed and reinstalled. Photographic processes are not documentary for me but theatrical and propagandistic. They give proof that an alternative world is possible, and that they need only to step into the looking glass.

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Installation has become the most direct way for me to stage these propositions. Drawing on my theatrical background, I create immersive environments that collapse institutional architectures—most notably the Catholic Church and the gym. These are spaces obsessed with the male body, disciplined by ritual, saturated with homoerotic charge, and blatantly hostile to homosexuality. From the pulpit beneath a nearly naked Christ, homosexuality is condemned; beneath the showerhead in a locker room, desire circulates through covert glances and proximity. It is within these contradictions—where homophobia and homoerotica coexist—that my work locates its charge. I am interested in this friction—where devotion and lust, shame and pleasure, collide and briefly become indistinguishable.

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My current installation, The Most Illustrious Chapel of the Divine and Holy Pleasures of the Centurion and his Beloved Pais and the Holy Arrows that Pierced Saint Sebastian that Dispel Plagues (Don’t call my name, Alejandro), brings these concerns together. The work merges the locker room and church into a single architectural body. From above, towers of lockers, benches, and tables form the mass of a cathedral. Inside, hundreds of objects accumulate: footballs, jockstraps, crucifixes, flowers, love notes, reliquaries. Through the notes a love story emerges. Scrawled on a kneeler is a phone sex line that demands confession of desires. Mirrors implicate the viewer and reveal hidden scenes. Olfaction further immerses the viewer: laundry detergent, body musk, fresh-cut flowers, incense, rubber all emanate, mix, and create the space. Bass-heavy dance music reverberates as if inside a vast stone chamber, occasionally giving way to Gregorian chant. The result is devotional and profane, sincere and excessive. Numerous seating opportunities make it a place for contemplation, socialization, and perhaps even cruising.

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At the heart of this project—and several others—are the reliquaries. Each contains a scrap of underwear and a memory from a past lover. The practice began with Harry, the British boy with whom I lost my virginity. After we finished having sex, he suggested we trade the underwear we were wearing so that we would each have something to remember the other by. I have continued this ritual with every lover since—427 as of this writing. Each pair functions as relic, and I mean this in the full Catholic meaning. Underwear is intimate and holds the bodily trace of the individual wearing it like a contemporary Veil of Veronica. It is simultaneously sacred and profane. I am interested in that contradiction. The reliquaries preserve that which has been shamed.

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This investment in ephemera is inseparable from my own history. As a teenager, after coming out, I was sent to conversion therapy in an attempt to correct my sexuality. Through prayer, coercive pseudo-therapy, and moral education, my relationship to Christianity became deeply fractured. Much of that period remains inaccessible to me due to trauma. In the installation until only the breadcrumbs remain…, I turned again to ephemera—digital traces, forgotten messages, residual images—to reconstruct what had been erased. Rather than creating a narrative of the trauma directly, I allowed fragments to accumulate via sheets of vellum paper. Even as I worked to preserve the memories the vellum would crumble in the hands of the viewers after repeated handling. Ephemera became both subject and method: a way of working with what survives.

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José Esteban Muñoz writes that queerness is an ephemeral practice, one that exists in gestures, moments, and structures that resist permanence. I take this proposition seriously, but I also push against it. As an artist-scholar, I am interested in what happens when the ephemeral is given architecture—when a one-night stand is granted formal archival structures, for instance. My work builds alternative worlds grounded in devotion, excess, and desires. These are not fantasies of escape but rehearsals for a new way of living. In doing so I create alternative pleasurable worlds that escape the harsh realities of heterosexual hegemony in favor of homosexual hedonism. It’s not that I have given up on the straight world but believe that it must be dissolved so that a new form can emerge. One that I hope to build for you.