[Written on the occasion of the exhibition, Hot Spots, on view at Elgin Street Studios, March, 2026.]

It is my hope that this handout will provide answers to all of your questions.

I am the oldest of seven children, and within that lineup, I am the second or third most gifted artist, maybe fourth. In terms of funny, I am somewhere in the back of the pack. But with regards to musical talent, I rank second among my brothers and sisters. That’s a red ribbon in swim team terms! And, not to brag on top of a brag, but I have access to a certain vocal register between crooning and dark witchery that renders the men and women of this world almost powerless to resist the urge to tear off their clothes and run with me about a moonlit clearing and there to do unspeakable things. That’s where I’m coming from. I’m irradiated by language and alienated by design.

It is easy for me to tell stories. It is tough to tell stories through art. Physical things can feel closed-off, instrumental, inexpressive. But everything in this world, ourselves included, has a choice to make. We can add to its glamor and mystery and throw our bodies into the unknown, or simply take up space.

Glamor means different things to different people. Unwanted cake, internet broadcasted holidays, old movie stars seen through coats of vaseline. Dazzling wealth. The cult of the powerful and the charisma of brute force. Glamor also suggests venality, shiny things, wadded up aluminum catching sunlight in the mind of a grackle. Chickens drowning themselves in their reflections in bowls of water. The wages of a sinful life. Glamor can be frontal or furtive, inverted and insidious, living in the folds of double meaning and evocative misdirection. A photograph of Dolours Price in a thick black scarf. Emma Goldman’s profession of the importance of dancing. Joan Didion’s evanescent portrayals of the Manson Family girls. Che Guevara in a bald cap importing revolution to Bolivia. The global echoes and body count resulting from CIA mastermind James Jesus Angleton’s appropriation of TS Eliot’s phrase “wilderness of mirrors.” En fin, the contemporary world’s tickets on the bloodbank installment plan for several seasons of the cold-blooded theater of Vlad Surkov, the sinister plum-faced director of the modern world. So, yeah, glamor. It’s not real. But it’s not, not real.

One of the results of the STEM funding priorities of the past thirty-odd years is the unethical unregulated efflorescence of monetized, weaponized, dehumanized technology. Not that music, literature, or art observe ethical strictures on any real level. They don’t, despite their own protestations to that effect. However, music, literature, and art all depend on bodies being thrown in the gap. As a singer and performer of certain kinds of music I have thrown my body into the gap. There is a kind of ethics that derives from the body and its limitations, the waxing and waning of physical power. We are living on top of one another and in our own way. In the real world we are reminded to be courteous to one another, or else.

The work in this show goes back as far as August 2025. As a casual view will confirm, I work with unassuming materials: color, paint, lettering, string, fabric, cardboard, grommets, sandpaper, wood bits. Sure, this is a world of beauty pageants, but imagine the possibilities if we include the overgrown and the underfed, the weedy and the oafish in the pageant. Art, all art, is about getting away with it. And, getting away with it is a liberation from not getting away with it.