Someday I'll love a body

My work is about the abandoned/absent figure. I make paintings about the soft and hard complexities of queer sexuality, gender and the non-binary body. A soft complexity is an understanding, welcoming or acceptance of the realities these bodies live in and through. Discrimination and hatred against these bodies are the hard complexities. The central subject of my current work is the figure in space, which reflects the body as an entity marked both by sex and as a marker of sex. I’m interested in the acts of natural and unnatural imitation in painting: how to choose when and what is represented from observed, lived nature versus the intentional omission of aspects of the visual world to make images from the invented and imagined self. I use plain figure depiction along with color relationships of non-objective painting to create a restrained visual language. The absence of a body is a reminder of what can be. I have simplified my surfaces to contrast figurative elements as a way of pointing to bodies that are not present or represented. I do this to encourage viewers to unlearn and reimagine their conception of what a body is or is not.Studio Ar