The School of Love (2016)

I decided I would make work about how I learned about love.

A faun serves as my doppelgänger

  • Young

  • Driven

  • Sexually voracious, tongue out to demonstrate the utter immersion of desire

    • A symbol of how desperate I was to be loved.

    • Upside down, confused, conflicted

  • A pagan symbol of sexual agency

  • A fragment that contains all of it

    • Hanged / Hung / Lynched / Spiked / Nailed / Hammered

The paintings become sites for the heads, building on their two- and three dimensional relationships to the pipes, poles, flanges, and floor. The sites include other images, texts, people, and forms that make up my sentimental education.

How do you learn to love? Who teaches you?

  • Your parents?

    • Mama knew, but daddy was gone

      • <a lot of looking for daddy>

  • Your church?

    • Abomination / Leviticus

      • <a lot of worshipping in the disco>

  • The men in the bookstores / movie booths?

    • You are so desperate to learn you let them do what they want

      • <my love stories are gay porn films>

When every picture/movie/image/idea of you is a criminal/thing/object/void being killed over and over, how can you be loved? Why would you want to be?

Some of what I was taught took a long time to unlearn.

Some of it is not true.

Some of it.

Some.

S.L. 
Dedham, Massachusetts