This work focuses on the body and its connectivity to the natural world from a male perspective. In Western culture the female body and nature are linked, as objects of male gaze and domination, while the male body’s own involvement with the natural world is seldom considered. Yet it is through our bodies that we as men and women each constitute a part of what is human, and are all woven into the environmental fabric of the earth. The severing of the masculine from the living landscape is one of the ways patriarchy harms both men and women, and contributes to our present environmental crisis.
The work also draws on my many years of engagement with the Mojave Desert. My experience of being naked in the desert is both meditative and deeply sensual. I have come to understand it as a kind of personal phenomenological investigation, which begins with a setting aside of social identity and my own life story. Nakedness allows me to adopt a more primordial human identity, and affords a less burdened view of my own body and masculinity. I become keenly aware not just of the things I am perceiving and feeling, but of my own visibility to the living beings and inanimate structures that surround me. And I understand that my sensory experience of being in the world is inextricably linked to this deep bodily awareness of my own visibility.
The work also draws on my many years of engagement with the Mojave Desert. My experience of being naked in the desert is both meditative and deeply sensual. I have come to understand it as a kind of personal phenomenological investigation, which begins with a setting aside of social identity and my own life story. Nakedness allows me to adopt a more primordial human identity, and affords a less burdened view of my own body and masculinity. I become keenly aware not just of the things I am perceiving and feeling, but of my own visibility to the living beings and inanimate structures that surround me. And I understand that my sensory experience of being in the world is inextricably linked to this deep bodily awareness of my own visibility.
In the counterpoint of seeing and being-seen, everything plays a dual role. Through self-portraiture I am able to see what I can never see otherwise: my own body on equal footing with all the elements of the desert landscape.