UC San Diego

No ordinary sleep includes nine works that combine oil painting with photographs printed on canvas. The painting and the photograph are not resolved into a continuous image but rather left with the seams exposed: painted figures floating in an uninhabitable, photographic space. The nine images depict the same two young men, nude and in close proximity to each other but rarely touching. These paintings raise questions about modes of reproduction, the use of the composite, fantasy, kitsch, desire, homoeroticism and identity. In No ordinary sleep, instead of making "straight" paintings, I am muddying the waters of identity, gaze and viewpoint to create queer images that are a hybrid of painting and photography, that cross and confuse assumptions about desire, and that are not defined by established plateaus