So, it says you started making art midlife. Tell me about that process and what drove you to make art.
I don't feel as though I had a goal to make art as a younger person and was then somehow frustrated or inhibited from doing it. My mom engaged me in making art with her when I was very small. So, [creativity was] something that was there from the start, but it was something that my mom was always facilitating.
As I got older, I was doing a lot of community theater. So, there are ways in which I was engaged in the arts, but not necessarily about making stuff. And that was true for a long time. Then I came to New York for college, and I've lived here off and on since.
I’ve met a lot of working artists in New York over the years that I've been here, and I got to learn a lot from one of them at a time when I was super broke—he offered to pay me to come in and help him out. As a result of that, I learned about his practice and the idea of being a visual artist and having that be your career.
He’s a professor, and he made a point of introducing me to some of his students and their friends who were of a similar age to me and similarly weird. And I spent a lot of time hanging out with them, modeling for them, watching them make art and arguably making some myself. I was always sort of dancing around the edge of it—I feel like if you're in New York and you're queer, it's not hard to be proximate to it.
I used to volunteer at and later produced an event that still exists called Folsom Street East. And via Folsom East, I became involved in queer fetish and kink spaces elsewhere, and a lot of my involvement was predicated on things like apparel and costume. Those spaces, as well as the styles and the meanings inherent in the styles, can be very rigidly defined. There's a lot of custom manufacture. But there's something about that that is very prescriptive. It's very uniform. And I liked it,I respected it, but I definitely couldn't afford to have anything made, and, honestly, I was like, well, if it doesn't really resonate with me in terms of how I want to present myself in those spaces, is it worth spending however much in order to make this happen?
So, I'd been attending and working at this event for years and had never gotten up in kink regalia. And then, in 2019, for the first time, I made this thing. Dig deep enough on Instagram, and you'll find it. It's not great. It was pieces of body armor, and I think I had a coaxial cable that I was using as a microphone, like Beyoncé. I just pieced something together from all of these parts. It was not skillfully done. But people liked it, and I thought it was fun. And then, COVID happened.
I had moved to Rockaway maybe a year or two before, and I had started collecting things. The thing about living in Rockaway is that there's a lot of crap to collect. Like, stuff gets abandoned in vacant lots that are pretty accessible. Stuff gets washed up on the beach. A lot of it is not of much value for my purposes, but a lot of it is.
You find those gems, and you take them home, and you think, Is this gonna smell bad? Is this going to decay between now and the time that I actually get around using it? And if not, I clean it up, find the space for it, and hang on to it. In early COVID, I had saved all of these inner tubes from bicycles—my initial COVID project was that I was going to make an Elizabethan ruff out of them. So, I bought a bunch of dental floss to use as thread, and I went to town on the tubes, and I made a ruff. I posted it online, and people were excited, and I thought I could do more things like this. I mean, what else am I gonna do?
That following winter—2020 into 2021—a woman in my neighborhood named Riitta Ikonen, who is also an artist and originally from Finland, started producing a weekly event where on Sunday afternoons between Thanksgiving and May Day, she went down to the beach and, following a family tradition of cold water swimming, would strip down to a bathing suit and jump in the ocean. She invited anybody in the neighborhood who wanted to come with, and wherever others were elsewhere in the world, to jump in the water with her virtually at 2 PM on a Sunday and share photos and videos of their swims to Instagram. Because that winter was just so bleak, it turned into the weekly highlight for everyone in the neighborhood.
I challenged myself to make something—a dress, a headdress, a costume—every week.
Setting that mandate for myself every week really helped me grow and learn how to make stuff, and also learn what people respond to. I would do bigger pieces on big days. On Christmas, I dressed up as Santa, but I had the full crazy Charles Dickens Santa with pine boughs coming out of everywhere. I made a special costume for my birthday on the beach—the basis for that was a 15-foot roll of DOT construction fencing that blew into my yard. And I was like, "This would make a great train." And it did!
And suddenly, I'm making a lot of things. And the momentum didn't diminish. I didn’t have a goal beyond the act of making and challenging myself to try different things.
Would you say that going out wearing the pieces is a process of engagement?
As far as other people engaging me, yes. But the fact that I'm doing it willingly, even eagerly, doesn't mean that there isn't reticence about it because I don't always know how people are going to react.
In 2021 I was walking to the beach wearing a dress every Sunday for months. I have a neighbor whom I’d seen many times but had never spoken with. One Sunday, he was out fixing his car when I walked past. He put down what he was doing and said, "Man, you gotta have the biggest balls on you of any guy I don’t know.” “How’s that, friend?” I replied, sensing potential danger. “The shit you wear,” he said, “unbelievable. I wish I could get away with that." And the sense of longing in that statement is really telling.
What I learned from that experience and others is that it's all about the allowances people make for you based on who they see you as. Understanding that afforded a perspective on how much of the work is about understanding myself as a man and how I present and what that means. That gendered self-presentation is something that all people grapple with to an extent every day.
I think the difference for cis men (both queer and not) is that you may be grappling with it, but you're not supposed to talk about it. You step into a different uniform, and while you don't necessarily become a different person, you have a different role to play, and people have a different regard for you. Walking around my neighborhood as a big, beardy guy in a dress afforded me an insight into the fluidity and the fragility and the precarity of those roles and that regard for all people, and for all men in particular.
Can you tell me a bit more about your cyborgs? And when you wear these pieces, you transform into a cyborg, but you do not go into character. You are still you.
You can look at each of the different cyborg costumes as a uniform—the uniforms are being worn by different people—or different aspects of the same person—for different purposes. So, part of it's contextual.
Part of it is also that sort of elevation that happens as part of being in uniform. But, you know, there's an elevation or something quasi-religious and mystical about that aspect, tooThere's the ritual act of making the thing. There's the ritual act of putting on the thing.
There's an apotheosis—which refers to sort of the elevation of a saint in the Roman Catholic tradition, probably other traditions as well—a sainthood, where that individual is raised up and made most visible and most powerful by virtue of this particular set of circumstances.
The other reference that I invoke a lot is the Transfiguration. I can't remember which disciples are involved, but Jesus goes up to the top of the mountain. His disciples are there, facing the mountain, and he's suddenly raised high in glory. And he becomes this brilliant personawho is not the person that they know on a day to day, but is also that person.
And, at the risk of sounding megalomaniacal, that's the kind of experience that I want to convey to others—as well as have myself when I am making these and when I am putting them on.
[The cyborgs] are kind of like avatars that I get to inhabit. Inhabiting those doesn't necessarily mean that they are facets of my personality or facets of my experience, but in many ways, they are. Someone asked [me] the question, "When you assume this, do you feel empowered by it?" And there's a real kind of ambivalence there because I do at times, but I also feel beholden to them in a certain way because there are moments when the thing that I've made feels like it has more of a power over me than I do over it.
What are you exploring personally with the cyborg pieces?
People tend to be overwhelmed by the whiz-bang shininess of it all, and I love that. I love seeing people respond that way. I love seeing kids respond that way. But there is deeper stuff going on that I've had a hard time making apparent for others in some part because it’s just becoming apparent for me.
A particular challenge when I started making these was that I couldn't figure out the why—apart from “because I can” and “because I have the time and the inclination.” The real question was, why this? Why this crazy thing? Like, I could be making any number of things. Like, you know, I could be not making anything at all. Why did I start doing this? And why do I keep doing this? I went back and started thinking about where this was coming from, and part of it is definitely rooted in my own sexual expression in a way that I didn't feel like I owned until I started making these, despite having been very active in the fetish and kink community.
But I hit on something the other day where I feel like the thing that drives so many of them is a sense of wanting to belong and never quite feeling like I do. That's part of the militaristic aspect of my work, too, because I've been around the fringes of the military for a big part of my life, but I never served. At one point, I was a continuing education student at a military college—all my professors were uniform, and most of my classmates were. It was exhilarating, but I was not a part of that.
I also tried to find community in kink, but I never harmonized well with that community because I had trouble accepting its standards and the conventions of attire and behavior and interests at face value, so that too is fraught. And it’s also about my relationship with my parents—my father, in particular, since he's the focus of this work-in-progress installation.
When I was very small, my father was traveling all the time because he was in the military. I idolized my dad as a kid, and part of what you see now are the artifacts of that idealization. But he didn't figure in my life much, so it was easier to idealize him because he wasn't around.
[These works are] about finding that sense of belonging, despite the stark isolation that these figures appear in. I have ideas and fantasies about cyborgs or cyborg-like creatures being part of a community of their own that have never really manifested in the art. And again, it's partly the whole necessity of their uniqueness [because I don’t find enough materials to make the same one twice] but also because it's something that I'm not ready to realize. Maybe at some point, I will be.