When I was a kid I carried around a small messenger bag full of little toys and pictures. The pictures were clipped out of magazines and comic books. Devoted to the pictures I pulled them out, one by one, to shuffle through them just to see them, and handle them. It was a compulsive act of desire.
Today, I make small pictures–painted collages–that are easily handled and moved around my studio. They are made by layering image transfers with paint. The process is tactile, and labor intensive, requiring multiple stages of gluing images down and rubbing away the paper backing. When the paper is removed the image reveals itself to me evoking the act of handling those little pictures from my past.
In my work, my childhood desire to bear witness to pictures converges with my queer desire. Through image collecting, I explore desire in images both new and old. I approach each piece intuitively by working in many layers. I arrive at pictures constructed from dating app imagery, pornography, and Google Image searches. My work questions the origins of queer desire, its aesthetics, and persistence in visual culture.