Self: Icon, Object, Specimen

Self: Icon, Object, Specimen is an ongoing self-portrait archive about gay desire and iconography. Through studio work, fashion aesthetics, projection, and reconstruction, I negotiate with sacred, national, and art-historical systems that shape belonging.

Self: Icon, Object, Specimen is an ongoing archive of self-portraits. My self-portraits are inherently wrapped up in gay desire and in the power of iconography to shape who is seen as sacred, desirable, and worthy of belonging. In the mirror stage, the self is pieced together through the image; my photographs are exercises in that identity construction.

Moving between studio portraiture, the aesthetics of fashion photography, projection, and makeshift reconstructions of art-historical images and religious icons, I make photography a site where identity is made or borrowed. I try to equalize my desire with the images that restrict and discipline the queer body. My body becomes an icon, object, relic, a scrim for projection, and specimen. I want to be multiplied, investigated, wounded, and looked at.

Methodologically, the studio is both a site of fabrication and a site of witness: halos visibly built, light across the face like a scanner, frontal portraiture holding the body in grief. I begin with the frontal address and aureola of Byzantine icon traditions, move through a makeshift reconstruction of Petrus Christus and the longer lineage of the reclining nude - from Titian to Manet - then arrive at Gilbert Stuart’s Athenaeum Portrait of George Washington and Bierstadt’s American landscape.

The next stage of this archive is to refine these accumulated photographs into a more focused body of work, while making new images that bring these visual systems into sharper relation. I want to extend the project’s methods of projection, reconstruction, and studio construction toward an exhibition-ready sequence.

Growing up gay within a conservative Christian experience, I craved belonging. This work seeks no admission. I do not mock belief; I enter these traditions, question their exclusions, and insist on my place within the conversation.