(re)Pose began with images of bodybuilder Nick Deacon, but its subject is the distance between the body I recognized as a child and the body from which shame later estranged me. Across prints on paper and metal and mixed-media works, the figure shifts from representation toward abstraction: model, blank canvas, ghost, and possible self.
The series is an act of reclamation. Masculinity once appeared to me as something wholesome and luminous, then became something I believed belonged to the Other. By repeatedly dismantling and rebuilding Nick’s image—and by bodybuilding under his coaching—I make that inner ghost increasingly solid. The work does not restore an untouched past. It gives form to an identity that survived and can finally be inhabited.
