The portrait drawings started as an indirect way to deal with my father’s death. A postcard of Dali I found at his museum in Figueras reminded me of the way my father sometimes sat in a chair. The series expanded to include other aging twentieth-century cultural figures. With their flamboyant costumes and sensational behavior, these artists, writers, fashion designers, interior decorators, performers and collectors, including seem to be trying to divert their own attention from the traces of mortality that appear upon their faces and bodies.
More recently I have become interested in drag as the most extreme form of transformation. These drawings are begun in pencil and continued in collage. Facial features and fragments of clothing are drawn separately in ink and gouache and then pinned and rearranged on the drawings in a process that echoes the fluidity of drag identity. After drawings of Jack Smith and Ethyl Eichelberger, I began to work from my own photographs of drag performances The work allows me to transcend my reserved personaility, and to vicariously participate in the kind of bold and courageous physical transformations that I would not dare to create on my physical body.
The pavilions began with a copy of an opera house that was part of a wallpaper designed by Saul Steinberg in the fifties. A series of ornate buildings ensued, expanding into Roman, Islamic, Asian, and Byzantine styles, among others. At first, the pavilions were always symmetrical, pink, lime and orange. Next, they began to grow upwards and askew, in various colors. They could be seen as fantasy versions of my architect father’s mostly utilitarian shopping center designs. Unlimited additions are possible, and eyes are proliferating, as if the pavilions are versions of the precarious structures representing our bodies in dreams.
