I’ve completed the design and mockup for my next installation. It’s a project that brings to an end, methinks, a 10-or-so-year cycle of works based around the theme of the big hairy male form, and my intimate relation to it. I’m tentatively calling it Web, and it has three components: a wall of large colorful and blurry images of actual spider webs, just light passing through these delicate things; 12 images of a big hairy butt, photographed close up, the images arranged to evoke the form of a web, and less-directly a stained-glass window; and 2 groupings of light passing through forearm hair, arranged to allude to strands of webbing.
For the past decade, I’ve been constructing arrays out of close-up images of big beautiful furry bodies, creating documents of our intimate encounters—spinning a visual web of sorts, luring viewers into a sensual encounter with my subject. This project is about the possibilities of intimacy and the tenuousness of life and pleasure, about trying to make art out of what’s in front of you, about light and how we see what we want to see, about finding something magical and provocative in something as ordinary as the spider webs in my backyard, or Dean’s furry butt.
