Engaging with ideas of cleansing, my practice explores good and bad as literalizations of what we consider clean and dirty (e.g. the clean fight, dirty money, cleanliness next to godliness, and so on). As queer expressions, sharing in a history of AIDs and sodomy stigma, the work asks especially how moral hygiene might effect our social worlds.

Materials used to subtract or substrate (soap, bleach, erasers, gesso, tube whites) here become additive and sculptural. Repeat bleaching “rots” fabric, soap takes on living character, and the gessoed substrate is extruded and eroticized. These flips plays with divisions of living and sterile, organic and aesthetic. They engage and question minimalism, that deep refinement of subtraction, while relating affectionately to the 1990s abject movement and post-minimal sculpturing.

The work is a collision of social and germ theories; where the ideal and living meet an impasse; our deadlock with dirt.