Unwrapped

These images focus on the male body as a site of erotic pleasure and desire. Western culture has long depicted the female body as a site of fantasy and erotic projection, while the male body typically alternated between the heroic (Michelangelo's David) and the pathetic (Michelangelo's Pieta).  These works mix up contemporary gay pornography with images from religious or "high art" sources, and then prints these images on wrapping paper, or superimposes them on top of each other in provocative ways. Most of the images exploit the paper not just as neutral substrate, but as a way of complicating the meaning and experience of the images. Moreover, these works attempt to push a connection between religious and sexual states of the ecstatic. My goal is to provoke a new consideration of the relation of body and spirit, that can include rather than exclude the sexual (as is true, for example, in Hindu religious art). At a time when the word "worship" crops up repeatedly on pornography sites, it is necessary to consider what we "believe" and how those beliefs are related to our bodies. This is an ongoing series of works, begun in 2007.