I’d like to introduce you to GUS. GUS is an exploration in bigness. Through paintings, drawings, sculpture, and digital works, the characters in GUS' world reveal a freedom of being big, without the societal constraints or expectations of being a bigger person. The moments you can have with GUS can feel familiar, or they can burst into realms of queer fantasy. Aesthetically, the environments, patterns, and clothing choices that frame GUS are features intentional to the meditation on bigness.
GUS plays with proportion, visual expectations, texture, sensuality, queerness, and gender. I create GUS in a place of symmetry, beauty, joy, self-love, zen, and relaxation, an alternative to the immensely charged feelings we have—and project onto others—surrounding weight, food, and size. GUS is an escape from a world that puts psychological, emotional, and expectational weight onto a bigger person.
The GUS pieces are designed to evoke smell, taste, and touch as they relate to the viewer’s own relationship to size. I want the viewer to feel immersed in a body like a GUS. To see through GUS’ eyes but also through their own experience. The viewer can relate to the feeling of the warm sun on skin and the coolness of a dangling hand in water. Remember the softness and smell of grass, flowers, the stickiness of ice cream melting down your hand. These tactile memories are potent and poignant. I am creating a space where both GUS and his viewers can experience a moment of peace. You are to be removed from the weight of it all, to float in a space free of judgement, expectations, and preconceptions. My intention is to create a space for the viewer to observe and be in a body as it is, in a life as it’s experienced, and to feel how beautiful it all can be.