Artist Statement
My work draws inspiration from the ornamental grotesque, creation myths, and mysticism. Among its manifold entry points, my paintings also grapple with the concept of hermeticism as a path toward receiving grace. In previous iterations, I have used the artist Forest Bess - who lived a hermetic existence creating abstract symbol-laden paintings sourced from visions - as a spiritual guidepost. This painting calls upon an archive of apointed queer ancestors or patron saints from my home region of the gulf south. Louisiana native and Houston drag phenomenon Naomi Sims is recasted here as as le feu follet–a spectral or phosphorescent light emitted in swamps, marshes, and bogs. Often seen by travelers at night, bioluminescence is thought to cause this natural phenomena, which has been known to lead wanderers astray and even to their death in swamps. In this and previous bodies of work, I employ le feu follet as a visual and allegorical device to destabilize environments within my paintings. Similar to le feu follet viewers are transformed into witnesses adding to a cumulative (if invisible) weight of folklore, hermeticism and mystical phenomenology. The painting asks us to occupy an imaginal plane–one that operates not in terms of what one sees, but the manner in which one sees.
