thoughts. Print

Ideas surrounding transformation are recurrent themes throughout my work. I am fascinated in how temporal materials, including lighting, makeup, and decoration can transform bodies, hallways and nightclub into something strange or uncanny.

Through my work I create a visual image or object in disjunction with quotidian representations of my subject: nightclubs are brightly light, rather than dark and sexy; soap is wet and dirty, rather than fresh and clean; unremarkable male bodies are superficially transformed into hyper-masculine models.

There is an implication of queerness that plays an important role in the reading of my work, not only as a suggestion of strangeness or difference, but also in the work's relationship to sexual orientation.

Jesse Finley Reed
 
 
If You're Lonely by Nick Burd

Presented as an outline, a controlled sense of emptiness. He was a boy who never learned how to throw a football until the day in a field behind his college dorm, he did. He is unemployed and only leaves the house for bad groceries (snack cakes, orange soda, cough syrup) and to find me twisting in my foyer, too shy to speak. When my voice does come to life, it’s to ask if he would like something to drink. He’s had too much already. I want to put things in him. I want the outline to be filled. There is a note somewhere in the apartment with his screename, my screename, my password, and an apology. If we get married, I will read it at the reception and people will laugh. If I never get married, it will be because I believe in love.

I have made out with pillows, fucked furniture, caressed countertops, argued with light fixtures. I have opened my door to an empty hall and thought, Ghost knock. I have moved from one coast to another and found myself followed by the shirtless and the damned, some of them so similar to the faces I left behind that while I might get their names wrong, I usually have their flaws right. My secret is that I am the same. I am no different. I’ve taken many roads. I was 14 and fucked into oblivion the garage behind my childhood home, a garage I painted during the Summer of No Love, and it has made all the difference. This is why I am always afraid they are going to kill me until I find myself breathing at the ceiling, feeling more alive than ever.

None of them know how to dance. Movement is secondhand and calculated. Always contextual but never hythmic. If you turn on the music, they tune it out. They slouch on the red velvet bench and look around for something cool. You can tell they go out too much because they think the remix sounds more right than the original. It’s this kind of thinking that takes us far away from the artist alone in his room. Try this: take a sip of whatever you’re drinking and then stare into your bedroom and say, “Presented as an outline, a controlled sense of emptiness.” Listen for what comes back.

If you’re lonely, stand close to the window until your reflection brings you comfort. Wait patiently for the moment when the other self breaks away, when the arc of his hand doesn’t quite match yours, when you start to realize he has succeeded in areas you have failed. Get online. Fall into a sinkhole of one-handed communication. Send photographs that portray you as easygoing, popular, naked, big dicked, up for anything, glamorous, supine, wallflowesque, constantly in motion. Describe yourself as hipsterish. Say you like Bjork, the Scissor Sisters, 80’s hair metal. Lie through your teeth and pay attention to the hiss it makes. Nonsmoker. Versitile. Athletic. Swimmers build. Negative. Five foot eleven and a half. Seven and a half inches. Dirty blonde. Ambivalent. Loving. Just a few blocks away.