My art practice — ranging from inks, watercolors, and acrylics to photography and collage — really only emerged during the pandemic, when I needed (and had the privileged opportunity) to occupy my time when not in a series of Zoom meetings. I had always loved art, and I regularly read artists' biographies for pleasure, so I found myself buying a sketch pad and trying my own hand at art making. I was hooked.
I also found myself wanting to write more and more about art, and I was really drawn to artists such as David Wojnarowicz and Herve Guibert who were both artists and writers. I produced some pieces on some of my other favorite artists (Catherine Opie, Nayland Blake, Darrel Ellis) for the Los Angeles Review of Books, and I now have a forthcoming book from Fordham UP on queer visual artists and writers, called DAMAGE: MEDITATIONS ON QUEER ART. While I was working on that book, I was also continuing my art practice and even took a course on queer photography through the International Center for Photography. The course and the practice of photography aided me in conceptualizing my work on other artists, especially queer photographers such as Opie, Mark Morrisroe, and Laura Aguilar.
I post some of my own artwork on my Instagram account, and was delighted when a gallery, the XYZ Gallery of photography in Melbourne, announced a show on queer self portrait photography and invited me to participate. I'm totally an amateur so feel very honored to have work shown alongside some professional artists!
As to the work itself, I have for a long time been fascinated by the self-representation of queer subjects. Queer people have frequently come of age at times and in environments in which we are told by others who we are, including how sinful, sick, or "damaged" we are as queer people. And yet, many queer folks have demonstrated creative resourcefulness in taking control of their own self-representation. I try to explore some of this dynamic in my own critical work, in the monograph WRITING DESIRE, as well as in my own creative nonfiction, such as DEAR QUEER SELF: AN EXPERIMENT IN MEMOIR. Being able to explore queer creative energy in visually rich work has been a true delight — and one that has inspired me to think more robustly about the connections between written and visual forms of self-expression.
