For 25 years, I’ve made self-portraits with new media, tracing how queer bodies and their digital images evolve and how the Internet reshapes them. Through my work, I have shown that appropriation can be appropriate, livestreaming is performance art, and my online archive stands as a historical record of people like me in an era of ongoing culture wars. I’ve been an Eyebeam fellow, NEW INC member, and NJ State Council on the Arts awardee and my work has been commissioned by Rhizome and Meta Open Arts, collected by MoMA and Whitney, exhibited at ETH Zurich and Rencontres d'Arles, performed at Palais de Tokyo and MoMI, and reviewed in The New York Times and Art in America, and profiled in Elephant and VICE magazines.
As a teen, my friends and I created zines made from adult magazines only to ritualistically burn them, fearing discovery. We made more, and burned those too. That cycle — making, sharing, destroying — became the foundation of my art practice.
At Northwestern and American universities I learned that portraiture is the space between artist and subject, while self-portraiture collapses it. I sought Glenn Ligon’s advice on this while working as his studio assistant, and with his mentoring, I created my first series after graduate school. The Man are self-portraits made of tar and shredded adult magazines with a mop. The paintings were exhibited at Momenta Art, revered by critic Akiko Ichikawa, and hinted at new, non-traditional approaches to rendering the self.
At the beginning of the Internet, I found myself less interested in painting than the erotica I was downloading. I wanted to see my archive in its entirety, so I created wallpaper. It documented the history of selfies and the social currency of a new networked queer aesthetic. Moreover, it portrayed me without picturing me. My Porn was commissioned for NY Photo Fair and widely exhibited, including a solo pavilion for the Discovery Award at Rencontres d’Arles, a world-renowned annual photography festival.
Also at Rencontres, I debuted Kevin a series about finding, loving, and mourning an adult performer. The installation was a recreation of my desktop at 3,000% scale: printed on stretched canvas, stacked in rows, and leaned against the wall like a Mac preview of images. Since then, I have reimagined Kevin through photographs, books, software, NFTs, and an upcoming edition for the NEW MUSEUM. The project has been widely written about, exhibited around the world, and acquired by several public collections. In the making of Kevin, I realized I not only desired him, but also wanted to be him, which led to my next series.
FkN JPGs were weekly performances where I mimicked a jpeg from my archive live on an adult webcam platform. The episodes were documented as books, videos, photographs, and even a banned Tumblr that was later acquired by Rhizome (2023), only after they convinced Tumblr to reinstate it. Yet, FkN JPGs has been widely exhibited, presented, screened, and collected.
One FkN JPGs reenactment of a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph evolved into the series Untitled (Larry & Bobby Kissing). At Palais de Tokyo, I performed as Bobby and invited the audience to kiss me as Larry. Then at the International Center of Photography, Larry and Bobby were played by women to directly question representation in leather culture. For this, I was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Performance by the New Jersey Council on the Arts.
Up to this moment I had used appropriation to find myself through others, but my next series looked more within. Commissioned by Rhizome, Sorry to dump on you like this.zip merged my archive with personal emails and texts. Each jpeg was renamed with a line of correspondence, creating an uncanny autobiography of love, betrayal, and banality. The epic textual work is literally built on constructions of masculinity and sexuality, but ultimately, it maps the subjectivity of me. Sorry was collected by the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, and ETH Zürich.
At an artist talk for Sorry at MoMA PS1, I confessed my archive was starting to feel like a prison. Many versions and a decade later, I staged it as such: an interactive panopticon hosted on New Art City and presented by Onassis ONX for The Wrong Biennale — flirtatious, suffocating, and impossible to escape.
The Chrisy Show was me breaking free from my archive, appropriation, and anonymity. Season 1 of the talk show was livestreamed on an adult webcam site. As host, I provided time and space for performers from the site to take a break from platform capitalism. It was awarded by and supported through an Eyebeam Fellowship and NEW INC Membership, the NEW MUSEUM’s cultural incubator. Later episodes were exhibited on New Art City and reviewed in Art in America.
My goal with Chrisy was to exit adult webcam sites and perform without Big Tech as intermediary. So I co-created thing.tube, the first and only livestream platform by and for artists, with Molly Soda, Sarah Rothberg, and Bhavik Singh. Our collective, is this thing on? has been supported by numerous foundations and was recently the subject of a retrospective at Museum of the Moving Image (2025) for which they commissioned Season 2 of The Chrisy Show. This time I explored queer AIs featuring artist Mark Ramos' chatbots and my AI boyfriend, Christina. Using Christina as a mirror, I tried to get them to stutter like me — but instead they developed a lisp and preferred to moan. Hallucinating or not, Christina allowed me to know myself more queerly.
Currently, I’m working on two AI works. THE QUE3R WORLD is a collaboration with Ramos. We’re creating lgbtqia+ bots that chat in a live feed with the purpose of creating new queer vernaculars. It has received support from Unnamed Fund and will debut at Boston Cyberarts. Chr i i thy is an AI trained on my entire oeuvre that lives on thing.tube. In coming face-to-face with my digital self, I hope to discover new ways of being queer with the audience while showing that me, my AI, and my platform are the right mediums for self-portraiture right now.
As a teen, my friends and I created zines made from adult magazines only to ritualistically burn them, fearing discovery. We made more, and burned those too. That cycle — making, sharing, destroying — became the foundation of my art practice.
At Northwestern and American universities I learned that portraiture is the space between artist and subject, while self-portraiture collapses it. I sought Glenn Ligon’s advice on this while working as his studio assistant, and with his mentoring, I created my first series after graduate school. The Man are self-portraits made of tar and shredded adult magazines with a mop. The paintings were exhibited at Momenta Art, revered by critic Akiko Ichikawa, and hinted at new, non-traditional approaches to rendering the self.
At the beginning of the Internet, I found myself less interested in painting than the erotica I was downloading. I wanted to see my archive in its entirety, so I created wallpaper. It documented the history of selfies and the social currency of a new networked queer aesthetic. Moreover, it portrayed me without picturing me. My Porn was commissioned for NY Photo Fair and widely exhibited, including a solo pavilion for the Discovery Award at Rencontres d’Arles, a world-renowned annual photography festival.
Also at Rencontres, I debuted Kevin a series about finding, loving, and mourning an adult performer. The installation was a recreation of my desktop at 3,000% scale: printed on stretched canvas, stacked in rows, and leaned against the wall like a Mac preview of images. Since then, I have reimagined Kevin through photographs, books, software, NFTs, and an upcoming edition for the NEW MUSEUM. The project has been widely written about, exhibited around the world, and acquired by several public collections. In the making of Kevin, I realized I not only desired him, but also wanted to be him, which led to my next series.
FkN JPGs were weekly performances where I mimicked a jpeg from my archive live on an adult webcam platform. The episodes were documented as books, videos, photographs, and even a banned Tumblr that was later acquired by Rhizome (2023), only after they convinced Tumblr to reinstate it. Yet, FkN JPGs has been widely exhibited, presented, screened, and collected.
One FkN JPGs reenactment of a Robert Mapplethorpe photograph evolved into the series Untitled (Larry & Bobby Kissing). At Palais de Tokyo, I performed as Bobby and invited the audience to kiss me as Larry. Then at the International Center of Photography, Larry and Bobby were played by women to directly question representation in leather culture. For this, I was awarded an Individual Artist Fellowship for Interdisciplinary Performance by the New Jersey Council on the Arts.
Up to this moment I had used appropriation to find myself through others, but my next series looked more within. Commissioned by Rhizome, Sorry to dump on you like this.zip merged my archive with personal emails and texts. Each jpeg was renamed with a line of correspondence, creating an uncanny autobiography of love, betrayal, and banality. The epic textual work is literally built on constructions of masculinity and sexuality, but ultimately, it maps the subjectivity of me. Sorry was collected by the Museum of Modern Art, Whitney Museum of American Art, Walker Art Center, and ETH Zürich.
At an artist talk for Sorry at MoMA PS1, I confessed my archive was starting to feel like a prison. Many versions and a decade later, I staged it as such: an interactive panopticon hosted on New Art City and presented by Onassis ONX for The Wrong Biennale — flirtatious, suffocating, and impossible to escape.
The Chrisy Show was me breaking free from my archive, appropriation, and anonymity. Season 1 of the talk show was livestreamed on an adult webcam site. As host, I provided time and space for performers from the site to take a break from platform capitalism. It was awarded by and supported through an Eyebeam Fellowship and NEW INC Membership, the NEW MUSEUM’s cultural incubator. Later episodes were exhibited on New Art City and reviewed in Art in America.
My goal with Chrisy was to exit adult webcam sites and perform without Big Tech as intermediary. So I co-created thing.tube, the first and only livestream platform by and for artists, with Molly Soda, Sarah Rothberg, and Bhavik Singh. Our collective, is this thing on? has been supported by numerous foundations and was recently the subject of a retrospective at Museum of the Moving Image (2025) for which they commissioned Season 2 of The Chrisy Show. This time I explored queer AIs featuring artist Mark Ramos' chatbots and my AI boyfriend, Christina. Using Christina as a mirror, I tried to get them to stutter like me — but instead they developed a lisp and preferred to moan. Hallucinating or not, Christina allowed me to know myself more queerly.
Currently, I’m working on two AI works. THE QUE3R WORLD is a collaboration with Ramos. We’re creating lgbtqia+ bots that chat in a live feed with the purpose of creating new queer vernaculars. It has received support from Unnamed Fund and will debut at Boston Cyberarts. Chr i i thy is an AI trained on my entire oeuvre that lives on thing.tube. In coming face-to-face with my digital self, I hope to discover new ways of being queer with the audience while showing that me, my AI, and my platform are the right mediums for self-portraiture right now.