Following a sabbatical in 2016, digital photo collage began as an informal practice on a newly purchased iPhone, often worked out while hanging out in gay establishments around Dallas — a way to practice art making and pass time creatively. Over the next several years it grew more frequent, and in 2023 became the primary medium.

This is work in the folk tradition: self-taught, outside any formal training, made principally on the iPhone and supplemented by various apps and the wider internet. That lineage matters.

Artists like David Wojnarowicz worked in photo collage and mixed media through the 1980s and into the ’90s, often without formal training or institutional recognition of their own, insisting on gay presence in a culture that refused to recognize it — underscoring the essential reality that gay people exist, and have a right to exist.

My own work is now an homage to their visual successes, and a continuation of that same understanding: the validity of gay presence in the world. Through this new purpose, this new medium, and this new work, a new subject has emerged: the swan made human.

Black swans mate for life. And within the species, that lifelong bond is often between two males — two black swans committing to each other, raising a family, and doing so with a strength and capability that rivals, if not exceeds, that of a male-female pair. A black swan, or a pair of black swans, appears within these collages for exactly this reason — a reminder that just as this species includes gay pairs among its own, so does the human species, and that presence is an essential, positive force within culture when it is allowed to simply exist.

Documenting the positive force that gay culture provides for the larger society is the force being my studio practice. And we are beginning to see what that looks like at scale: stable relationships, families raised well, people who are honest and open about who they love, contributing fully and openly to the world around them. That’s not a hypothetical. It’s already visible wherever it’s been allowed room to exist — in nature, and increasingly, in us.

The swan made human. Not a metaphor stretched to fit an argument, but an observation about what nature already does, plainly and without controversy, when left alone to do it — and a claim that the world is better, not worse, for making room for it.