David
Bryan
Stevens

Everything I make has something underneath it.

That's the part I'm actually after — not the surface, but what the surface is keeping from you. A sheet of copper looks finished until fire and salt eat down into it and reveal the colors that were always waiting. A street sign points one way; look past it and there's a cross, a church, a whole argument the sign never meant to start. A drawer of silverware is just a drawer of silverware until you count to thirty and feel the betrayal sitting there.

I build in layers — literally and otherwise. Metal over canvas over thread, ink bleeding through ink, image collaged onto image. I let oxidation and chance lay down the bottom strata, then I cover and uncover, hide and reveal, until the thing has a depth you can fall into rather than a picture you glance at. The prettiness up top is the invitation. It is almost never the point.

Because I'm interested in what we cover. Beauty laid over decay. The sacred sharing a frame with the profane, since I've never believed they live in separate rooms. A rose — gorgeous, romantic — and the thorns you only notice when you reach for it. I keep planting that rose in steel gears and bloodied grounds and across the chests of sleeping men, because it tells the whole truth at once: the lovely thing and the thing it costs you.

And the body, which is the most covered thing of all. The large, hairy, queer male body — mine, my husband's, my tribe's — kept under clothes, under shame, under a culture that would rather not look. I take the cover off. I wrap it in leather and lilies and angel wings instead, drag it into the classical tradition that always pretended it wasn't there, and dare you to keep looking.

I came up as a graphic designer, so I know exactly how to make a polished surface. I just refuse to let the surface be the end of it. I work in copper, in film grain, in pixels, and in AI — and I use the machine openly, as a medium and a collaborator, the newest tool for digging beneath the obvious. Every layer I lay down is a question about the one below.

So look closer. There's always something under there.