Idiot’s Delight (2011-2012) is about commercial consumption and the objectification of the male body. In juxtaposing the still life genre alongside modern-day action figures, the photographs reference historical painting as well as digital media. Through the careful consideration of color, surface, and space, every image depicts a sterilized universe of fantasy while also representing estrangement from the sensual world itself. At the same time the pictures are meant to be humorous, reflecting our self-imposed isolation in an age when pornography of all kinds is so readily available to serve as “comfort food."

"The Anxiety of Influence" examines how the male body and objects that reference anatomy (such as statues and sex toys) are utilized in photographic culture to personify history, power, divinity, and desire.

In Strange Terrain (2014), artists Aaron McIntosh and Nick Clifford Simko have fabricated a queer world in the form of textile artworks. Thematically the exhibition considers man’s complex relationship with nature, obscured histories, and the multilayered implications of material culture. Like the duality found throughout so much of the work, its title references thematic links between wilderness and gay culture as well as both artists’ first journey into collaborative territory.

As there was considerable overlap with their areas of artistic inquiry, Simko and McIntosh decided to collaboratively create two new pieces: The Stake and The Archers & The Quarry. Both artists bring their own personal voice to these recent works in addition to selections from their individual studio practices. McIntosh’s sculptures specifically address Southern textile traditions and the material dialects of desire. Simko’s tapestries, on the other hand, examine the role of literary devices like allegory in visual culture.

Using historical genres of image-making (allegory, portrait, still life) paired with contemporary means of artistic production (digital imaging and photography, jacquard tapestries woven on an electronic loom), Allegories of Art History (2012-2014) surveys the dialogue between the visual cultures of the past with human life in the present. Thematically this ongoing project considers the metaphors of materiality, the fragmentation of history, and the ability of iconography to conceal and reveal meaning.