The act of eating dinner is a theater of identity formation. It sets the stage for a ritual - a daily liturgy that both comforts and constrains. This is an inherited ritual. I sat at the table because my parents did, and theirs before them. In this way, the work is filtered through memory, not just personal recollection, but of embodied memory.

It creates a semi-autobiographical depiction of the conditions that molded my identity. The surreality of the scene invites questions around the ephemerality of these memories and the liminal, in-between nature of identity.

Open and closed. Hard and soft. Masculine and feminine. Straight and Queer. 

The emotions embedded in this work stem from growing up in the Midwest. They speak to anyone who has experienced the quiet violence of being bifurcated. How and why do we limit our expression and identity due to the environments we inhabited in childhood?