a.k.a. skips

I am an artist who does not deconstruct - I Destroy and rebuild. This manifests differently in the disciplines I move between. It can be seen most literally in my work as a musician, Destroying the EDM career I spent most of my life building to begin my gender transition. My photography book "i want to rest and be held by someone who loves me" was a eulogy for the first 30 years of my life, memorializing the many acts of self-Destruction required to live inauthentically. In my introduction to visual art - my teenage years doing graffiti in San Francisco - every piece began with the Destruction of property. Today, I invite Destruction into my work as both a fact of life and a friend. Since I am no longer afraid of Destruction, I can see the divine possibilities for creation it leaves in its wake.

As a high-masking autistic person, the process of coming home to myself begins with Destruction. Destruction as an embodied practice, Destruction as a form for devouring shame. Destruction of the persona created for the expectations of society. 

My work explores that process of Destruction through a multi-year series of nude self portraits, sitting in conversation with my surgically altered, hormonally changed, and still unaccepted body. Through Destruction I am left with my honest self unobscured, a sex worker and queer transsexual man. I rebuild by rejecting assimilation as a source of validation, love, or safety.

In the capture of a fleeting moment I Destroy the flow of time and the context that surrounds it, both past and future. In turn, this gives infinite space for creation, for the meaning of that moment to expand.
 Though nude, my body is not presented in line with trans fetishization or conversely, to show how "well" I have transitioned to a binary standard (often a measure of value). The viewer is invited into my own, ever-changing self-image, and left with the question of how they relate.