Copper Votive Artifact was not created as an elaborate conduit to deliver an artist statement. It is an installation of highly symbolic elements assembled for you to author your own narrative.
However, if you need to know the story, here it is.
This piece started with loss and emotional conflict. Driving through my old neighborhood, I passed the studio that used to belong to my mentor, Yoshiaki “Yoshi” Yoshinari. It was gone. In its place was Spiritus Tattoo, owned by another old friend, Kat (aka Musca Domestica).
I messaged Kat as I headed out across the country. Yoshi was dead, taken by cancer a few years prior. Shocked, flooded with remorse and regret, I grew distracted, neglected my fuel gauge, and ran out of gas in rural Pennsylvania.
I don’t think Yoshi ever knew his impact on my life. I used to bring paintings to his studio. A Japanese man with shoulder-length gray hair and round, blue-tinted glasses, he would deliver backhanded critiques: “Woooooow, so much energy! You have to be young to make work like this.” One day, I returned with an entire painting built around what he disliked about the previous one. He loved it. He placed it on an easel in the front window of his gallery and wouldn't let me leave with it. In that moment, I learned there are no rules. Flow with your creativity, hone your craft, and it will always serve you.
But the story Kat told me was unnerving. She found it difficult to talk about him, not out of grief, but conflict. To Kat, Yoshi was an antagonistic misogynist. I was reeling. How could a sensitive, forward-thinking, gay, compassionate, Buddhist artist possess this dark side? He was no poster child for sexism, yet here we were. She told me he died a lonely man, and that she rescued some of his paintings from a dumpster. A once-renowned artist who rubbed elbows with Keith Haring, discarded, salvaged only by the compassion of a woman he antagonized. I was shook.
With all of this on my mind, walking along a country road, I found the skull of a stag, one antler snapped off. I picked it up. It felt significant: a broken symbol of male vitality, discarded and half-buried in dirt. I took it home, and the pieces for Copper Votive Artifact began assembling in my mind.
The stag is a cross-cultural symbol of masculine strength, something often contorted into violence and oppression. Inarguably, our world was built on a patriarchy that domesticates us into subservience. The beauty of what it means to be a man has been twisted into a weapon that isolates us from our own humanity. Repairing this skull is my own processing of grief, history, and my role in this unfolding sickness.
Rebuilding this symbol atom by atom through electroforming is alchemy. The process is a sigil, a prayer, a spell. It is a hope that our species can look to our wild core and leave the crutch of falsehood behind. This, for me, is the votive.
The rest of the piece grew from this core: the shrine, the ancient-looking walls, the degradation of the plaster and steel, the posters. These symbols are clear to me. I wonder what they mean to everyone else.
The two concrete squares are my monument to Yoshi. He would have loved them.
My Soap Box
It’s all drag. When you don’t realize that, it’ll drag you along, and that is a drag. Modern hyper-masculinity is just the cheapest, most theatrical version of this performance—enacted out of fear, born of absolute cowardice, with nothing to do with the real spirit of being human.
This is a much bigger picture than the obvious targets. Yes, we can point at the laughable alphas, the culturally bankrupt looksmaxxers, and the fascists whose cowardly, closeted sexual desires turn into violent punishment for a world they lack the courage to face authentically. But here is what I actually believe: every one of us, regardless of where we land on any spectrum of gender or expression, is operating inside a structure built long before we arrived. It manifests in awful ways, and the wake is tragic.
Nobody is outside of this sickness, and that includes me. This is not a disclaimer from a "woke" man looking down from above; it is the starting point. Growing up as a man in this culture meant growing up emotionally stunted in the precise ways men are trained to be. It meant having difficulty expressing what I felt and feeling a gravitational pull toward typical masculine proclivities. I have hurt people because of it.
The roots go deeper than any of us want to look. When humanity traded the fluid reciprocity of hunter-gatherer life for the rigid hierarchies of agrarian society, something broke. The plow and the property line gave rise to the patriarchy, and with it came a new kind of self-domestication. We caged ourselves, trading wholeness for order, mystery for control.
Think about what domestication actually does to an animal. The wolf becomes a dog. For all the love we have for it, the dog develops depression, emotional maladies, and a stunted maturity—a permanent dependency it never asked for and cannot escape. Its true, innate spirit never fully arrives. That is what we did to ourselves. The wound we are still bleeding from is not a modern internet glitch; it is a ten-thousand-year-old, unbroken lineage of colonialism, imperialism, and systemic aggression downstream of that original surrender of wildness for the false security of the enclosure.
The true catastrophe is this universal gender debacle: a systemic conditioning that forces us to slice our human identities in half. We are taught to fear our own fluidities. To protect our fragile, projected selves, we build a heavy shell of infallibility, buying into the lie that to be safe, we must be untouchable. We choke out our own creative, vulnerable souls because they do not fit inside the rigid box of traditional paradigms. We have lost our understanding of who we are as human beings because we are too busy performing our assigned roles.
I admire anyone brave enough to truly be who they are. Anyone. We are all cowards to one degree or another, and the ones who can admit it are the admirable ones. I am not sure it is possible, in this lifetime, to fully shed what formed us. The conditioning goes too deep. But the admission, the humility, the recognition that you are performing rather than living—that is where it starts. That is what matters.
Strip away the money, the possessions, and the performance. Where do you stand? That is the question this piece is really asking. I’m not asking it of the cartoonish extremes, but of every man who cannot admit he is not truly himself. The closeted. The financially dependent. The ones who cannot locate themselves without their props.
I am writing this for them. I am writing this for me.