In our everyday lives we are trained to focus on progress, success, and futurity. These mythologies of forward movement, as I think of them, have normative implications for bodies in social space: idealized physiques, emotional stability, and concealed heterocentric sex.

For many years now, I have been exploring the underside of these mythologies in my work. I would call them anti-mythologies of stasis, uncertainty, and melancholic nostalgia. For me, it is a body that is physically monstrous, paralytically desirous, and sexually expansive that lurks underneath the groomed and well-mannered ideal of forward movement. I explore how sex and desire stubbornly resist mythologizing containment, instead giving rise to groundswells of emotional complexity and intensely nostalgic introspection.

Focusing on the intimate sphere of the everyday, I examine characters that appear to be frozen in particular modes of acting or thinking. They can either seem as if they've been "caught" in a moment of daydreaming or simply stuck in an obsessive loop. They are sometimes portrayed as sad wretches who passively observe a colorful, sexy, and fleeting projection of the world, of which they are mere spectators. My subjects are stunted by time and circumstance and kept alive by melancholic longing.

At present, I would describe my work as a series of vignettes that allude to entrapment and paralysis. These vignettes are often populated by two different species of individuals: hermaphrodites and "concrete" men, both indirect representations of female and male types, respectively. The Concrete Men, expressed as hard-edged and rigid, sad and powerless, are portrayed in an ambiguity of action, unable to allow themselves to feel--to be overcome with emotion--nor to act on latent violence. The Hermaphrodites are pure sexual beings, acting on impulse and seemingly unaware of their more masculine counterparts; in these studies, I explore sexuality as raw desire, avoiding socially-constructed dichotomies or labels.

Formalistically, I frame these characters with mistakes and ambiguities of all sorts, literal and metaphorical. The way that paint is treated to suggest accidental strokes and visual elements that are jarring within a controlled universe are part of this attention to intentional awkwardness. My characters, who tend to be either voyeurs or subjects of voyeurism by other characters, in turn implicate the viewer as yet a third, adding an emotional dimension to the formal tensions I explore. The abstracted and fragmented architectural spaces and landscapes then provide both a conduit into and a refuge from these private or intimate situations in which the characters are involved.

I once believed that, for the viewer, I hoped for no emotional resolution other than the acceptance that things can be simultaneously disquieting and harmonious, grotesque and beautiful, trite and sophisticated. But I think I have grown to want to convey more. I attempt to saturate the narratives that I portray with emotionally-loaded visual cues. Some of these cues can be quite trite, exploiting conventional and even commercial triggers of nostalgia. Awe-inspiring landscapes recalling Marlboro cigarette magazine ads, for example, contrast with spare and sad bedrooms. Sexual bliss on the part of one individual is juxtaposed against the self-disenfranchized voyeur. On the one hand these scenes show what is; on the other, they allude to what was, what might have been, or even what never was. They continue to resist visual and emotional resolution, but I have also come to be aware that I hope they transmit the added--and fiercely disappointing--realization that any such resolution corresponds to noth ing more nor less than a social myth, whereas our emotional and sexual lives are explosive with an energy and desire that defy categorization.