A connection to an institution that shapes us is like a relationship. At times it is fruitful and everlasting, other times it's turbulent and brief, the majority of the time it's somewhere in between. Passion and fervor for a cause or belief can erratically give way to sharp edges that one might not see in the moment. Individuals and faith; we rely on each other like lovers with passion and strife in equal measure, giving and receiving.

Construction is the key word as even the most sacred of institutions like the church is not based on an essential morality, yet the system requires a constructed narrative to demonize perceived deviance. As a queer man I’ve seen this growing up in small-town Oklahoma where good and evil rhetoric allowed for the othering of people who didn’t fit into their defined narrative. It was unsettling but also fascinating to see how people who stray from their normalized environment were vilified by the dogmatic domination of the church, especially when they sought absolution from the entity that hated them so much.

Having had the benefit of time and seeing that relationship in retrospect; like a burned page from an old archive lost to an eon of prejudice and fanaticism, the lustful nature of the divine and infernal are mirrors to a history that has been hidden from view. Our contemporary language of sex and sensuality, dominance, and submissiveness are present in the beliefs we hold. This past is what I am recontextualizing. To see a different perspective that possibly seeks to reconstruct and reconcile itself as an erotic interplay between bodies that reflects a connection between the deviant and the dogma. The believer and the faith. The demon and the angel.