Mutilations
Location
FA-203
Start Date
1-5-2026 12:50 PM
Department
Art + Design
Abstract
Mutilations is an attempt to give flesh to an interior sensation. These mixed media paintings explore my desire to hurt myself, my desire to be hurt by others, and my ambivalence toward my transsexual body. Initially working from photographs of myself being fucked and/or harmed in masochistic ritual, attempts to depict these scenes with representational imagery give way to the physical conjuration of feeling through gesture, texture, and accumulation. The surface becomes a surrogate for my own flesh, a doppelgänger for incestuous passion or violence, the resulting piece a reflection of my own vulnerable body. I incorporate collage and assemblage as processes of sacrifice and transformation through which drawings, journal pages, photos, and assorted debris transcend their atomization and metamorphose into a new entity. The canvas consumes and assimilates these offerings, absorbing their context, rupturing and transforming them via simultaneous revelation (exposing and exhibiting previously hidden materials) and concealment (tearing, desecrating, smothering – rendering illegible). The surface is marked by traces of these histories, mutated through the violence of their application. The art object is ultimately a record of contact: an intercourse between body and surface, giving birth to something sickeningly corporeal.
Faculty Sponsor
Nate Mathews
Mutilations
FA-203
Mutilations is an attempt to give flesh to an interior sensation. These mixed media paintings explore my desire to hurt myself, my desire to be hurt by others, and my ambivalence toward my transsexual body. Initially working from photographs of myself being fucked and/or harmed in masochistic ritual, attempts to depict these scenes with representational imagery give way to the physical conjuration of feeling through gesture, texture, and accumulation. The surface becomes a surrogate for my own flesh, a doppelgänger for incestuous passion or violence, the resulting piece a reflection of my own vulnerable body. I incorporate collage and assemblage as processes of sacrifice and transformation through which drawings, journal pages, photos, and assorted debris transcend their atomization and metamorphose into a new entity. The canvas consumes and assimilates these offerings, absorbing their context, rupturing and transforming them via simultaneous revelation (exposing and exhibiting previously hidden materials) and concealment (tearing, desecrating, smothering – rendering illegible). The surface is marked by traces of these histories, mutated through the violence of their application. The art object is ultimately a record of contact: an intercourse between body and surface, giving birth to something sickeningly corporeal.