Boi Boy

MFA Sculpture, 2025

When I was young, I’d often stay up late, sitting as close to the TV as possible with the volume turned low, absorbing any queer content I could find. That experience of longing and the idealization of possible futures shaped me and my artistic practice. As a result, many of my references draw not from traditional fine arts but from queer erotica, the new-wave queer cinema movement and iconic camp movies, artists such as James Bidgood, Greg Araki, and John Waters. My understanding of queer space, time, and perception has evolved through lived experiences and the writing of Jose Munoz in “Cruising Utopia.”

My work explores the themes of longing, desire, and sexuality through internal, external, and lived research. I create interactive sets, installations, and performances that utilize sculptures as props, enhanced by light, scent, and sound, to evoke feelings of joy, desire, and melancholy. The sadness in my work comes from a very personal place. I live with depression and bipolar disorder, which affects how I perceive the world. It’s about feeling sad in places or times that are supposed to be happy or being numb when I should feel joy. But there’s also comfort in the sadness, a stability that comes with depression. Some people who struggle with depression find a strange kind of peace in that numbness. I often ask people how they define happiness versus joy. To me, happiness is a long-term, unattainable goal, a pursuit of something like a utopia. While joy is fleeting, a brief moment that happens to you, it’s like a muse working through an artist: it comes and goes. I think about what it means to perform joy in my performances and performance objects, which draw from my many years as a drag queen.

I’ve explored joy and “the social practice of nightlife” (Cathleen Lewis) as a drag queen and as the co-founder of “Alter",” a colleaborative year-long artist-run space. Alter functioned as a once-monthly pop up club with ever-changing themed installations and performances, working with over a hundred artists, musicians, performers, drag queens, and kings.

When putting together installations, I often reference Serge Becker’s quote about nightlife being a “set design for a play that hasn’t been written.” Through this lens, the audience becomes a performer, the protagonist in their own story. The art transforms into a space for individuals to project themselves into a liminal realm between reality and fiction, fostering a suspension of disbelief and an opportunity for new moments of connection.

Art is a way for me to cope, process, explore, and understand myself and the world. There is something in the act of creation, producing work that others can experience, and that brings me joy. Of course, there are layers behind that, but there’s always a moment when something feels beautiful and exciting or makes you feel something, whether it’s joy or sadness. My work circles around bringing joy, humor, and exaggeration into a world that can often feel bleak.