when you're a boy... (2005 and ongoing)
When you're a boy, you can wear a uniform
When you're a boy, other boys check you out.
David Bowie - Boys Keep Swinging
I make drawings and paintings that explore relationships between and among men. The exchange of looks, the privilege of looking and the wish to be seen are positions I explore to reveal the ways men respond, desire, and relate to each other.
The images come from a variety of sources - my observational practice, movies, pornography, web surfing - basically I see someone and draw him. These drawings are the basis of my painting practice. But in addition to being a record of seeing, they function as notes to myself about a particular person or encounter. They document something about the men I have seen - their strength, beauty, cruelty, cowardice, energy, power, clothing - that I find compelling enough to draw and take back to my studio.
The work develops a different character in installation. The separate paintings or drawings are completed by placing them in a relationship that is influenced by the rectangular supports and the gazes with the drawings. The final arrangement is created from trial and error. I am looking for the economy of gazes that can be suggested from images in proximity and the frisson that comes from the structure of looking and the pleasure of being seen.
The drawings are installed floor to ceiling at the limits of peripheral vision. Seen this way, they become a catalogue of the pleasures, desires, and fears of a gay black man.
Like a chapel for the unrestricted and shameless gaze I was not allowed when I was a boy.