Sick Bacchus : A Grindr Love Story
43” x 55.5”
4x5 Large Format Film
A Social Media “Vanitas Selfie”
An aesthetic investigation tracing the potential consequences of Grindr, as the geosocial networking technology accentuates and accelerates the struggles with disease and drug abuse already inherent in contemporary gay and bisexual communities.
Caravaggio himself was a homosexual, and in 1593 when he painted his self-portrait as Young Sick Bacchus, he was ill and jaundiced from syphilis.
Pushing the allegory further, the model featured in this piece personally watched his first love contract HIV soon after their separation through excessive and careless drug-fueled hookups enabled by this social media technology.
Available Editions
Full-scale giclée canvas prints
Hand-painted special editions (limited)
Available for immediate purchase or produced to order.
The Mythic Source
For those who want to go deeper.
In ancient stories told by firelight, there came a violent rupture in the cosmos when Kronos, in rebellion against his father Ouranos, severed the sky god’s generative power and cast it towards the Earth.
Those divine masculine seeds collided with the vast womb of the Aegean Sea—that first mother of all life. From this tumultuous union of sky and water, of violence transformed into creation, rose the foam from which Venus emerged.
She arrived on the shores of Cyprus fully formed—a goddess with no childhood—born not of mortal passage but of cosmic collision. The sea was her mother, chaos her father, beauty her inheritance.
Her essence flows through these many names and forms —the rising, 8-pointed morning star of Inanna and Ishtar, the crowned Isis, and Shri Lakshmi, to the Brazilian shores of Yemanja. Like the ocean itself, she exists in perpetual motion, in waves that both caress and crash. She represents the feminine unbound from expectation, reclaiming divine autonomy, existing not for others but as a complete celestial force unto herself.
