I etched this a couple years ago on the biggest piece of copper I've ever worked on. I had been freaking out about what to put on it for ages, but I always feel like that when I'm working on expensive material. After ages of overthinking I decided, fuck it, if I fill the whole plate with garbage drawings it might look cool. I think it turned out pretty good.

I was hyperfixated on the Bible as a kid. I think it was because I couldn't stand the idea that life wasn't fair, and that book had this way of magically working everything out. I went through absurd nonsensical logical loops in my head to justify how an all-loving God could hate so many people. This piece is about coping with that.

Revelation 22:15 gave me nightmares. It describes God's rejects at the end of the world: whoremongers, dogs, magicians, murderers, adulterers, heathens, all cast out of the city of heaven. This is my experience of what it's like outside that city. It's not all that bad.

This one took me a long while. I started by fiddling with pipe cleaner, making this little fuzzy rainbow chain mail. It got me thinking about childhood, and armor, and what I wish could have protected me as a kid. What I wish I could have heard to help me love and trust myself. It goes without saying, I cried a lot making this piece.

The vest is made from this pseudo-army jacket I wore growing up. It's covered in hundreds of hours of arts and crafts I learned from my childhood at Bible camp: friendship bracelets, godseyes, stamps and patches and doodles, buttons and trinkets. My friends and I all chipped in, making felt horses, writing prayers and love notes and memories on my bedroom floor. We wrapped the notes around high-fired porcelain tiles, in layers and layers of duct tape, (I did some digging, amazingly that can absorb the impact of a bullet) and sewed them into the lining of the vest. All that tile really, really weighs the vest down.

It's lonely being a queer kid. It's painful to spend so much of your life not knowing who you are. Grappling with the realization that you don't fit in, that you'd rather suffer exile than be something you're not. Not knowing there are others like you. But then and again, there's so much joy in creating yourself. There's so much relief when you finally find someone as crazy and different as you are.

This was my goodbye to Barn Haus, the collapsing little red apartment my friends and I lived in for a year. We used to sit on the porch together for ages at night, playing music, reading junk mail, laughing and smoking and watching the seasons change. I loved that house. It was totally neglected by our infuriating landlord, and I often found myself falling apart with it. In my dreams, I had the money and time to fix up the whole place, to seal the fiberglass hanging from the ceiling, smooth out the splintering floors, and sand away the god-awful white paint covering every charming wooden detail. Making this banjo feels like I've still got a piece of the house with me.

I made it from scrap laying around the sinking basement, a broken stool, and a broken antique Worco tenor banjo I found in a thrift store. The collage across the neck is all wheatpasted spam from our infernal mailbox, flooded with endless subscriptions from eons of previous tenants. My housemates are wheatpasted to the calfskin drum. When I play it, I remember the porch.