My work as an assemblage artist is rooted in the belief that objects are witnesses– silent keepers of history, memory, and identity. I work primarily with found materials, mid-century male physique photography, and symbolic elements that together form layered narratives about masculinity, desire, vulnerability, and the human condition.

I come to this practice with a deep personal connection to my materials. My father was a master patternmaker who built wood foundry molds for industrial manufacturing. I inherited his tactile knowledge of how they were made, the feel of aged wood, the precision of hand-cut forms, and the quiet permanence of craftsmanship. These molds, once tools for creating machines, become in my work both relics and frameworks: carriers of personal history and emblems of labor’s dignity.

The other visual thread that runs through my work comes from vintage male physique photography, particularly from the 1950s. In their time, these images existed at the edge of cultural acceptance, coded expressions of desire wrapped in the language of athleticism and art. For me, they are not just archival ephemera but fragments of a hidden history, one that speaks to resilience, coded communication, and the enduring beauty of the male form.

I juxtapose these two inheritances, industrial relics and gay photographic history, with copper wire, neon light, religious iconography, and found objects from eBay and urban alleys. Humor and visual puns often surface in my assemblages. But they are never mere decoration: they are ways of disarming the viewer, opening space for deeper engagement. The materials carry their own histories, and when combined, they create unexpected conversations: sacred symbols alongside erotic imagery, handcrafted industrial forms framing intimate portraits, and pieces of discarded industrial age materials, evoking both physical strength and emotional fragility.

Themes of power and submission, devotion and longing, labor and loss recur throughout my work. Pieces such as Daddy’s Boy and John Doe examine the cost of conformity and the fragility of the “everyman.”

 

Works like Mi Corazón explores the protective environment we try to construct around the one we love, while An Aesthetic of Obedience confronts the erotic charge of power dynamics and consent. In each, the composition is both personal and political, rooted in my own experience as a gay man and in the broader narratives of social change, history, and shifting notions of identity.

 

My approach owes a debt to the great assemblage artists, Ed Kienholz in particular, yet my intent is not to replicate but to recontextualize. Where Kienholz often built immersive environments, I focus on discrete, self-contained works that serve as concentrated reliquaries of meaning.

I see each assemblage as a contemplation on identity and purpose, rippling across time and cultures. In combining the sacred and the profane, the industrial and the intimate, the playful and the solemn, I seek to create works that are both visually arresting and conceptually resonant. My aim is not to offer fixed interpretations but to invite the viewer into the layered, sometimes contradictory spaces where history, desire, and identity meet.n