Intimacy Issues
Intimacy Issues is an ongoing series reimagining nylon nude hosiery into forms suggestive of the human body, relying on the material’s function, corporeal association, and compositional resemblance to skin to invite its figurative reading. Across the series, variations of minimally altered hosiery evoke the female body through restrained gestures, often limited to cutting elements of a single hose, stitching parts together, folding, and stretching across the canvas. With little to no manipulation required to produce suggestive bodily forms, the series accentuates our natural impulse to decipher images and render the unfamiliar legible. This inclination is leveraged to expose social associations embedded in the material itself, particularly pantyhose’s relationship to women and femininity, the body, and sexual intimacy. Rooted in an attention to functional, everyday objects, the series echoes the sensibilities of late Modern art, particularly its interests in the abject and the Minimalist movement, while infusing those strategies with personal and collective meaning.
The process of stretching – or dressing – the canvas with garments otherwise known as “intimates” further personifies a once-inanimate object. As a decorative, fragile, and easily disposable “second skin,” pantyhose operate as stand-ins for feelings surrounding female sexuality. The repeated dressing and undressing of the canvas risks tears and defects, underscoring the material’s vulnerability as a metaphor for women’s societally imposed and self-valuation within intimate contexts. This domineering gesture of dressing the canvas in hypersexualized clothing also carries connotations of control, violation, and coerced intimacy, echoing moments of both consent and invasion alike, giving the series its title. All at once, Intimacy Issues touches on vulnerability and violence, suggestion and explicitness, and purity and tarnish.
2025 (Ongoing)
INTIMACY ISSUES I, 2025, nylon and thread on canvas, 8x8 in.INTIMACY ISSUES I, 2025, nylon and thread on canvas, 8x8 in.
INTIMACY ISSUES II, 2025, nylon and thread on canvas, 8x8 in.INTIMACY ISSUES II, 2025, nylon and thread on canvas, 8x8 in.INTIMACY ISSUES II, 2025, nylon and thread on canvas, 8x8 in.
INTIMACY ISSUES III, 2025, nylon on canvas, 8x8 in.INTIMACY ISSUES III, 2025, nylon on canvas, 8x8 in.
INTIMACY ISSUES IV, 2025, nylon on canvas, 8x8 in.INTIMACY ISSUES IV, 2025, nylon on canvas, 8x8 in.INTIMACY ISSUES IV, 2025, nylon on canvas, 8x8 in.
INTIMACY ISSUES V, 2025, nylon and thread on canvasINTIMACY ISSUES V (detail), 2025, nylon and thread on canvasINTIMACY ISSUES V (detail), 2025, nylon and thread on canvas
INTIMACY ISSUES VI, 2025, nylon and thread on canvasINTIMACY ISSUES V, 2025, nylon and thread on canvas