Subsumed

I’ve been swimming naked in Lake Washington for over three decades. Free from constricting clothing and far from shore, I love that the water beneath me is over a hundred feet deep. In those moments I feel exhilarated knowing I am completely responsible for my own safety. Out there with sky and water in all directions and Mt Tahoma floating in the south, I am fully alive.

I only discovered prescription goggles existed in 2020, and they’ve allowed me to see clearly underwater for the first time since childhood. I’ve been swimming with my friend Douglas for years, but now I can see his form and the way light reflects and refracts around him. I knew I had to document him and others. I rented underwater camera equipment and learned how to make images in the lake.

When I’m swimming in deep water, I feel like I’m part of the lake. Occasionally my tears merge with the lake as I release my fears and frustrations. Some of my favorite swims happen after midnight, with black waves glistening under a full moon and friends singing next to me. The frigid water, the darkness around us, and the ever-present knowledge of the abyss below is as scary as it is exciting. I am always thankful when my feet touch bottom after a long swim.

The lake is the temple I visit most often, and submitting to the water’s cold embrace is a small sacrifice for how much pleasure it brings me. The groundlessness I feel out there evokes Buddhist ideas around non-attachment: there is nothing to hold on to, and it’s best to relax and move with the flow. I love the daily reminder that I am not in control of anything except this tiny fleshy vessel, and even that is an illusion.

The images of friends, lovers, and strangers presented here are tokens of the deep reverence I feel for this body of water. Many of the folks in these photographs come to the lake as regularly as I do.

Many thanks to all of the people who modeled for me, and extra special thanks to Douglas Ridings, Mike Jacobs, and Dan Hawkins for helping bring these photographs to life.

Landloper

Noun, a wanderer, vagrant, or adventurer.

Earth is where we come from, and where we return. For me, this is literally the deserts of the Arizona and the West Coast. I have no ancestral connection to these lands other than being born and raised there. The desert was my childhood playground, and later my refuge. Growing up queer in a cowtown was rough, and as a teenager I would walk into the foothills outside Tucson to sing and dream about a better life. Even amidst all the harsh plants and terrain, I felt safe and held.

My friend Graham Downing is an artist who grew up making videos with friends doing dangerous physical stunts. His queerness, sense of humor, and adventurousness made him the perfect proxy to express the rough, queer spaces I imagined in the deserts as a child. Together, our childhood psyches merged with the making of Landloper.

Over the course of two winters, we met up around the American West and hiked into distant valleys and dunes. The leaps and falls, heavy objects lifted and thrown, and bodies merging with the landscape invoke the mythical, while reveling in naked, queer joy.

The photographs in Landloper, while seen through the memories and imagination of childhood, aim to subvert outdated myths and extractivist narratives of the desert perpetrated by generations of white artists. The goal here is to merge, however briefly, with the environment surrounding us.

Core to this work is understanding that these American deserts are not neutral spaces. They hold generations of sacred native histories that—like queer narratives—face rapid and violent erasure at the hands of patriarchal and institutional violence. Landloper creates temporary utopias that queer the patriarchal imagination that has come to define the West today. Having no claim to these lands, we tread lightly, knowing any imprint our bodies made will soon be erased by wind and rain.

The photographs are unique silver gelatin prints toned by hot lith developer, which adds its own imperfections as chemicals exhaust. While images can be reproduced, no two photographs are exactly alike.

Other participants inlcude Rafael Ruiz, Douglas Ridings, and the dancers of Whim W’him.

Milky

When asked what I do as an artist, I say that I put people in unusual predicaments and photograph the outcome. Much of my work focuses on my subject’s spontaneous reactions to the unexpected. I’m most interested in the dynamic between the person and the situation.

With Milky, the camera documented the immediate emotional reactions of 60 individuals being doused with cold milk. In the series the only constant is the milk; what is unknown is how the person will react.

In the images, the materiality of milk can act as a metaphor for the nature of sexuality — something that is fluid, tangible, yet ephemeral. Those who appear in Milky are my friends, lovers, and complete strangers who just happen to be coated in the fluids of another animal. By taking a familiar substance and perverting it, I talk about some of the emotions that sexual desire conjures: pleasure, danger, and detachment.

From the Distance: Portraits Under Lockdown

I've spent years working with identity politics in my art by expressing sexuality in humorous, poetic, and fantastical ways while trying to avoid the usual trope of beefcake sensuality. After just five weeks of isolation at the beginning of the Covid-19 pandemic I found myself losing my mind and I had to see my friends, even if just through their windows.

Armed with a ladder and speaking to my friends on speakerphone, I captured their images as they posed for me from the safety of their homes. This process provided me with a creative outlet, allowing me to see and interact with my friends, which proved instrumental in maintaining my sanity and grounding myself during these trying times.

The portraits helped me and others feel connected to our community that was all around us but hiding inside and staying safe. To share these intimate portraits, I started publishing them daily on social media. Unexpectedly, the project gained significant attention, both locally and internationally. The parallel between the COVID-19 pandemic and the AIDS epidemic was not lost on me, as I recognized the importance of community support during health crises.

These images, captured from a distance, not only reflected the unique circumstances of the pandemic but also became a symbol of resilience, connection, and shared vulnerability. They served as a poignant reminder of the power of human connection even when physically separated. Through this project, I found a creative outlet and witnessed the profound impact that art can have in fostering understanding and empathy during times of adversity.

 Wild Boys

Jose Esteban Munoz, in Cruising Utopia, writes “Queerness is essentially about the rejection of a here and now and an insistence on potentiality or concrete possibility for another world.”

Wild Boys exists in an alternate universe that, while actively hostile, is a place where queers have agency. The tribalism, rituals, and anachronistic imagery throughout the work have their basis in texts by William S. Burroughs, Jean Genet, and Hakim Bey. In this imperfect Utopia, intimate acts frequently transcend space and time and sometimes lead to death. These metaphors reference not only the stories of my youth but the current world we live in; a place where queerness is still “other” and must be defended if we are to do more than survive.

Wild Boys exists in this universe to open a narrow gap in a mechanized society, granting my peers a ritualized space to be fully alive and engaged, and to give a glimpse to outside viewers what always exists on a subconscious level. The narrative can only be understood in part, each image its own scene from a book still being written sometime in the past and somewhere in the future. 

Beaster and Bear

Since 2008, Adrain Chesser, Steven Miller, and Timothy White Eagle have been collaborating on a project of photographs, videos and installations titled “Beaster and Bear.” The two characters at the center of the work are artists Adrain Chesser and Steven Miller dressed in animal suits – Beaster Bunny and Bear.

The pair act as trickster figures (anthropomorphic animals who disobey the normal rules of conventional behavior), and establish a mythology that places queer people at the center of the frame instead of at the margins. The work aims to honor the multiple ways we as humans experience a living connection with nature and spirituality.

The trickster aspect of the work ensures that even as they honor nature they also acknowledge their personal involvement in its’ destruction; by creating a mythology for queer people they simultaneously show the shadow sides of excess; and that in honoring spirituality they also reveal the dangers of blind faith and zealotry.

These themes are frequently acted out in tableaus both spontaneously and elaborately composed for photographs. The models represent themselves as their highest, most idealized selves, and at their basest and most depraved. The settings are based on Renaissance paintings, effectively inviting a queer read of an era where LGBTQIA people were not visibly documented. 

Offerte

In my high school senior year, in a last ditch attempt at redemption, I gathered all my stolen pornography magazines, soaked them in lighter fluid, and set them on fire in my back yard. I’d felt shame, and a growing sense of dread, for as long as I’d known of my same-sex desires. I was also certain that AIDS would kill me. I half-heartedly hoped that burning these images and stories would free me of desires I did not want and had prayed to God to remove. I regretted it almost immediately. The desires persisted and, afterwards, I was haunted by the beauty of those men’s images disappearing in the flames. Last winter I revisited this act but with a different intention - to honor and transform that shame into a ritual of release and reclamation.

 The photographs in Offerte (offerings in Italian) document gay porn magazine pages from the ’70s through ’90s burning in a backyard fire pit. The scenes of unabashed lust and longing going up in flames aren’t hell. Perhaps the photographs look superficially Catholic and recriminatory in their imagery, but there’s little suffering here—the focus is defiantly pleasure-seeking. These moments of desire and flames exist in a sort of purgatory, a cleansing by fire to finally sit by the side of the Old Gods.

Decades later I joined a friend for an outdoor fire at his home. Retreating inside for kindling, he soon returned with old porn magazines to toss in the fire. Immediately the memories of my teenage purge came to mind. As an artist I needed to recreate that past ritual act, revisiting my childhood sexuality and shame. These are offerings to all the men who shared their sexual freedom in print without shame, these are offerings to remember all those we lost to AIDS, and these are offerings to desires that refuse be extinguished.

As an artist I saw the beauty of sacrificing these images from porn magazines as elegiac. It was a way to honor my brethren lost to AIDS too young. I also wanted to offer up their unapologetic sexual energy to the pagan gods of lust and love and trickery: Anteros, Venus, Mercury. By sacrificing pages of porn ritualistically in fire, the flames leave only the essentials: lust, longing, ecstasy, death, and renewal.

The combination of nakedness, desire, and all-consuming fire creeping across the images conjures up metaphors for love and loss through the AIDS years, and act as a timely reminder that pleasure, like knowledge, is a profound form of power.

 Many thanks to friends who dug out their old porn magazines and allowed me bring them "to light" one last time.

Les Fleurs du Mâle

The surveillance state is everywhere. Foucault’s concept of the Panopticon – the need for society to constantly observe and normalize any difference – is firmly in place with our prison system. Currently the United States has the world’s highest documented incarceration rates with one in three black men jailed at some point in their lives.

I am both repulsed and fascinated by our society’s ability to dehumanize entire populations enough to lock them away, and see the parallels of blacks with non-western gays around the world and our own history of gay persecution. Because it is nearly impossible to photograph inside a prison, I instead built my own - one that echoes French playwright and author Jean Genet’s singular film, “Un Chant d’Amour,” and his book “The Thief’s Journal.”

An openly queer author in the 1940s, Genet was imprisoned multiple times for petty crimes and indecency. By refusing to be “reformed” and choosing to revel in his powerlessness, he took ownership of his own life and subverted the dominant power structure. While Genet’s work is over half a century old, the core themes of male intimacy, violence, and the state’s abuse of power are as relevant as ever.

Les Fleurs du Mâle honors Genet’s desire to raise up the underclass by honoring these prisoners who transcend their own humiliations in small, important, even beautiful and fragile ways—the sharing of cigarette smoke through prison walls or the halo of flowers on a prisoner’s head, for instance. It illustrates that desire, in the end, is stronger than the need to control desire; these prisoners know how to take their pleasures, despite the threats and actions made by the state.

I come back to Genet in my work because he was the progenitor of the modern queer movement – the absolute negation of what straight society said was permissible. This work shines a light on the power that desire has over us, regardless of how society would integrate us and groom us to be “desire-less.”

 Bound

In Bound, rope symbolizes the mental, physical and spiritual ties that bind. Materially, the subjects are bound to self, others, and inseparably the unknown. The tied ropes are constricting or loose, a representation of the various connections and disconnections between friends, lovers and strangers. Ropes around the subjects' heads act as a metaphor for how we're wrapped up inside our perceptions and simultaneously, by emphasizing yet obscuring the face, the viewer is encouraged to consider other aspects of the body.

In many respects this work is informed by the theatrical, but here the darkened stage is replaced by utter blackness. The series aims to plot emotional points between figures that stand effortlessly in the void to those that are contorted in space. Some subjects appear completely at ease with those existential limits - their environment cradles them. Others seem to struggle with their conflicting fate. It raises the question: How comfortable are we when supported by the knowledge that, while some things are indeed know-able, the unknown remains both tangible and inevitable?