JACOB DAROCA-KINCHELOE

Richmond, VA

Growing up in the 80’s and 90’s, my first encounters with Queer identity were shaped by the HIV/AIDS crisis. Love and danger were inextricably entangled. Paradoxicality seems intrinsic to Queer being, extending into our relationships, our aesthetics, and even our senses of self. My work examines the experience of Queer desire with a focus on dichotomy and dissonance.

Locating beauty in the overlooked, the marginal, the abject, is a hallmark of Queerness. My work explores the border between glamorous and grotesque. These drawings express the struggle and pleasure of inhabiting a desiring body and examine the performance of identity and intimacy. Our insistence upon a complicated and unconventional approach to beauty, sex, and identity resists pedestrian norms and shapes our very existence as an act of protest.