Sacred Perversions

This body of work consists of large-scale self-portraits that marry Catholic iconography with erotic distortion. Familiar religious symbols are recontextualized through color, scale, and the body, creating a visual language that is both devotional and confrontational.
For centuries, sexuality has been defined through the male gaze, either consumed or suppressed. Even within moments of so-called liberation, desire is often still shaped by patriarchal expectation. The binary remains: virgin or whore. Sacred or profane.
These paintings reject that.
By inserting my own body into historically controlled imagery, I question who is allowed to define purity, pleasure, and devotion. The work resists both moral restriction and performative liberation, by instead occupying a space that is ambiguous, self-directed, and unresolved.
What does sexual liberation look and feel like when it is not defined by shame, or by the need to be desired? What happens when pleasure is not an offering, but an internal authority?
In this work, pleasure, sex, and connection are not oppositional to the sacred, they are sacred.