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What do you say about a body of work and a project that is more than 15 years in the making— tracing the foundations, value structure, and trajectory of my life as an artist and as a person? The art that was eventually to be included in the book, “Where There is Great Love there are Always Great Miracles” was made largely between the years of 2002 and 2010. During that time I had moved from California to NY for graduate school, gone from NY to Barcelona following love, and back to NY when that relationship ended. Leaving NY right after graduate school, immediately dashing the studio momentum I had built, was an emotional decision one makes when they are in love. I took many polaroids and other photos during this time, picked up random stuff that called to me off of the streets or at garage sales, and made very simple assemblages and sculpture from paper and trash, essentially—source material and the art that I was making coalesced into a sort-of goop where the autobiographical and a largess social and formal critique tangled into a cosmos. I wanted to challenge a sentimentality that I perceived around the conventions of what important art could be.

THE WORK
At the heart of the work that ended up being highlighted in the book was formal simplicity combined with loaded content. I did not take for granted the picture plane, rather, I viewed every sheet of paper as a sculptural object. I wanted to emphasize humility in contrast to high production slickness. Also, I wanted to engage the viewer intellectually and emotionally rather than display a virtuosic skill. I thought that high art was very good at alienating and obfuscating a magic that is available to everyone. Aside of these broad strokes, the thread binding my work from this time is a use of cartoonish flesh tones towards a pastiche commentary on romanticism, sexuality, communication, violence, death, exhaustion, horniness, drugs, abuse, memory, and war, among other human themes. Beige renditions of pinks, browns, and yellows dominated my use of color to create works that navigated the boarder between abject sappiness and very serious commentary.

There are around 50 works in the book. One that did not make it into the book is a work that I made right before moving to NY. It is a painting on a shaped plywood wall hanging in the silhouette of a flower. Painted with house paint is a depiction of a couple dressed for the prom while seated in the flower. The male figure has ripped out the sex organs of the flower and is handing them to his date like a bouquet. The reason that I’m including this work in this text is that it speaks to my thinking about humanness and romanticism. I believe that the title to that work is “Hearts and Tulips” but a subtext could be “Shitting where you Eat in the Name of Love.” The shaped surface foreshadowed a shift from allegoric image-making towards increasingly sculptural and abstract approaches to somewhat similar content.

The first work that I made in grad school was constructed from found plastic milk crates and shaped canvases forming a matrix wall-hanging. The milk crates were eventually abandoned and the shaped canvases were painted in a variety of different beige tones as described above. This work titled, “Flesh Field” can take many forms and orientations when hung on the wall. One orientation that I discovered vaguely resembled the barrel and chamber of a revolver which I hung coming out of the corner of the wall. I then drew the gun’s handle in sharpie on the adjacent wall. The integration of the wall transformed the space and embedded the message of the work into the architecture of the room.

Bookending this body of work was a sculpture that I realized around 2011. I created a wooden armature that held a fan perpendicularly and roughly 10inches off of the wall. I then fastened a queen-sized fitted bed sheet to the outside of the circular armature and over the fan so that when the fan is turned on the sheet would billow into an undulating round ball that looks like someone blowing a giant bubblegum bubble. When the fan is then turned off the sheet slowly falls into a sagging pink sack. I wanted the work to vacillate between anthropomorphism and a symbol of heightened sexuality.

As I said, there are nearly 50 works displayed in the book. I don’t want to describe them all here however a few more examples could be helpful: there are paper vaginas that I made while trying to make a Mother's Day card out of velum, a large canvas work that depicts a giant game of Tic-Tac-Toe where the X’s and O’s are made of painted roses where one dozen painted roses form a cats game where nobody wins, a figurative sculptural assemblage that includes a tattered heart-shaped pillow as a head hung above a chest protector that would be worn by a baseball catcher (the sculpture resembles a battered child), and a collage made of wall paper backing cut into abstract shapes, painted in pinks, purples, and browns and glued to a rectangular sheet of mylar forming a work titled, “Camouflage Baby Blanket.”

THE BOOK
Where there is Great Love there are Always Great Miracles came about because my work was evolving, I didn’t have any gallery support or opportunities to produce an exhibition of the magnitude that I felt would do justice to this body of work, and I didn’t want to completely put this work to bed and be lost to history. So, I pulled strings with a photographer friend that I had been working with at David Zwirner, documented all of the work, found an online book supplier that could produce a self-published book, and went to work on a draft. Initially, the book was a soft covered, small scaled artist’s book under 30 pages. Eventually, what resulted is a book that is over 150 pages long, displaying over 50 works of art, 10’s of photographs ranging from pictures that I took of Alcatraz, a photo of a wild rabbit on the Olympic Peninsula, and a photo of my grandmother’s funeral, and a short chapter of altered photographs that I made of a women’s shoulder pad from a shirt purchased at a thrift store.

Admittedly, the evolution of the book from this point is a little fuzzy to me. I had produced a few drafts. The book was evolving. I began writing and drawing in the drafts with sharpie; generally, titles of the works and random thoughts. It was evolving from being a document of a body of work to being a work of art itself, however, it was a chance encounter that would transform it into a gargantuan project that has taken more than 15 years to realize.

JACK
Sometime around 2011 I was visiting with dear friend, Niko Solorio, in my studio when attention turned to one of the drafts of the book. As we were looking at it I was trying to describe my vision for the work and book itself when I happened upon a description that was something like, “it’s a super-corny take on art history and formalism.” Niko perked up and uttered, “super corn” and jumped into a description of his great friend and mentor Jack Doroshow. He then suggested that I have to meet Jack and that, maybe, I should consider having Jack write an intro to the book.

I was not familiar with Jack and their contribution to contemporary culture, specifically as an icon to the trans and gay community around the world. I was open minded, but, a little hesitant to have someone that I didn’t even know make their mark on this body of work and project that was so important to me. However, I did agree to meet with Jack, which was a decision that would impact me and the book beyond measure.

Stepping into Jack’s apartment was entering another dimension. Both warm and razor sharp, Jack’s presence was one of an intellectual giant and a nearly saccharine generosity that was deeply challenging and simultaneously deeply nurturing and comfortable. That first visit we spent getting to know each other discussing everything from politics, family, history, art, love, among other topics while smoking joints and Jack’s menthol cigarettes. While we shared so little in life experience, Jack was a 70-something year-old drag queen from Philadelphia and I a 30-something year-old straight guy from Southern California, I felt a strong kinship to Jack’s sense of humor and was immediately drawn-in by his sweetness and wit. I didn’t bring up the book that evening. Nor did I bring it up in my subsequent visits. I would bring Jack tacos and tapioca pudding and we would prattle on for hours around his desk discussing life’s great themes and challenges. Jack would fire off questions around what I wanted out of life and what I wanted for myself through art. He would tell meandering stories that resolved into one-liners that aimed to inflate my confidence and steel my fortitude as an artist and a person. Over time, Jack became a mentor, a therapist, and a dear friend. After many visits I finally came around to bringing up the book. I still didn’t really know how best to have Jack contribute to this “Thing” I was making, but I thought that perhaps the best way to start would be to give Jack a draft and ask him to simply write his thoughts on the pages in almost a rorschach kind of way. We never worked on the book together, per say. Jack would write on all of the pages, then I would write on all of the pages, then he would add something, I would create new drafts as the book grew, he would write some more, then I would write some more and so on.. I began designing drafts with more space between images for our writing and, ultimately, I printed the edition of books and gave 3 copies to Jack to write all over while I began writing, drawing, and transcribing all of our previous writing onto the other copies.

The result of this back and forth was a book rich with an almost call-andresponse of coded textures of meaning, echoing and folding in on itself like some kind of fractal emotional oragami. Jack’s contribution took the content of the book out of my hands and helped to create something other. For instance, above a photograph that I took of Alcatraz Jack wrote, “So this is Africa.” Adjacent to a sculptural work, Portrait of Sex, which is a paper penis penetrating a giant mylar vagina with a floor element that is a mass-grid of bisected cardboard tubes painted pink and resembling salmon roe, Jack wrote, “Sitcom.” So, what was a very dry sculpture became culturally loaded through this almost Jazz-band jam-out that was our process. His influence taints the book, and even the works in the book, with an outside perspective and imbibes it/them with melodies that would not be there otherwise. At times, Jack seemed to be speaking directly to me— next to a paper sculpture of two giant flowers seemingly disintegrating in the wind, Jack wrote, “Can you do any better?” Or, in a short chapter that is centered around a photograph of a shoulder pad from a women’s blouse (Ideas in Shoulder Pads) Jack wrote, “So funny.” The words “Evening Sale” appear throughout the book I think as encouragement from Jack around the quality of my works.

Practically, transcribing all of Jack’s writing, my writing and drawing, burning pages (yes, there is a chapter that gets physically burned), among other interventions, the project of completing the book became a behemoth effort. Each book requires more than 40 hours of work. I toiled for weeks to barely scratch the surface of completion. Ultimately, the 21 copies and 2 AP’s laid incomplete, to gather dust for several years as I followed whatever current artistic inspiration. I moved to Los Angeles at the end of 2015 and the process of life seemed to push and pull me further from realizing completion. Then, near the end of 2017, Jack died.

NOW
Earlier this year I had a studio visit meeting with Ryan Noon to discuss what/ when/where/how’s for my next exhibition at his LA gallery. I had been working on a series of mixed media works centered around charcoal drawings. The series was developing but still very open-ended as to what they would become and what an exhibition would look like. Ryan pointed to the stack of unfinished books and we started discussing the works and the status of that project. After going through a copy of the book and debating the possibilities, we decided to finally present the works and release the book. A strange sense of relief washed over me. It became clear holding onto the book, unfinished, was suspending me in time. Immediately I could hear Jack saying, “yes please” while he held his hands up like puppy paws panting with his tongue out.

What ensued was a deep dive back into that vaulted body of work and back into Jack’s and my process of call and response. Honestly, it felt good to revisit Jack’s mind so intimately, revealing and reinvigorating our unlikely connection. When Jack passed away I was left with an imposter syndrome of sorts. Jack was this gay and trans icon to so many young men and I was reticent to piggyback onto his cultural importance to this marginalized community. But, when really getting back into our writing I was struck by how deeply we loved each other and important our relationship had been to me. When I met Jack I had no idea who he was. I was a NY transplant of 10 years or so, had no familial connections in the city, and was going through a prolonged and painful breakup. Quickly, and like so many others, Jack became my NY grandmother. He was inquisitive and his comments could be cutting, but he was also so deeply supportive— as quickly as he seemed to filet you and your character he would build you up and make you feel that what you were doing was of the utmost importance and value. He never told me but he confided in my friend Niko that I reminded him of his brother who had died young. I like to think that I gave Jack as much as I received from him, but in truth, A. That would be impossible, and B. I don’t think that we really wanted anything from each other.

The book is not the story of my relationship with Jack. It is something that we created together that would have been impossible to achieve without each other and our sinuous process. Jack revealed through his writing aspects of life and of my art that were occluded by my own expectations of what the works meant (with a capital “M”). He could control a valve that dictated feelings of self-worth. And, Jack could ignite a flame with a simple question.

One day, my ex (whom the book is dedicated to, somewhat hilariously) and I were up at the Whitney taking in the Biennial. Things were not going well between us. So much so that my sense of self was extremely challenged.. I could’t get comfortable in my own skin around her, but still wanted it to “work out.” I thought to myself, “Jack’s place is just down the street.. maybe if we go see Jack she will see how special I am and start being nice to me again.” So, we did. Upon arrival, things were normal. We sat down across from Jack at his big desk and got comfy— rolling spliffs and smoking cigarettes. At some point, Jack began asking me about my non-existent art career. As he laid into me about not taking steps to realize my dreams of being a respected artist my ex sat next to me nodding in agreement at Jack’s assault. I sunk into my chair feeling smaller and smaller and smaller. I didn’t understand why Jack was being so nasty. In the middle of making one of his points, out of the corner of my eye, I noticed a little wink. At the time, I didn’t think anything of it.. maybe he had a little spasm or something, I thought. After a couple of hours, my ex and I left Jack’s and headed home. Jack had really shaken me.. I didn’t understand why he would do that to me in that moment. I could never be angry at Jack but, that day he scared me and hurt me to a degree. After a month or so, I got the courage to go back and see him. Once again, I brought him some treats and we made small talk and settled in. After about 15 minutes, Jack kind of jolted and said, “I’m sorry about last time.” I was like, “yeah, you sort of threw me for a loop there.” Jack responded, “I just wanted to see if she would stick up for you.”

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FULL EXHIBITION INFO HERE