The Hastings Gallery

🌞 Revel and Revelation

A Field Guide to Pool Parties, Festivals, Drum Circles, and Naked Architecture

Welcome to Revel and Revelation—a collection of mythic stagings where Palm Springs becomes the backdrop for invented festivals, communal rituals, and architectural nudity. It’s part satire, part autobiography, and fully committed to the idea that joy deserves ceremony.

My process begins with photography—real people, real poses, often caught mid-movement or mid-mystery. From there, I cut the figures out digitally, recolor them, and reduce them to bold silhouettes. It’s part homage to Matisse’s late cut-outs, part theatrical staging. Each figure becomes a character, a glyph, a vessel for something larger than itself.

My digital practice draws its lineage from Fauvism—not just the wild color of 1905, but the radical clarity of Matisse’s final years. The early Fauves—Matisse, Derain, Vlaminck—weren’t painting what they saw. They were painting what they felt. Color was liberated from nature. Space was flattened. Emotion took precedence over realism. That’s the foundation.

But I also claim the legacy of Matisse’s cut-outs: the monumental simplicity, the theatrical silhouettes, the unapologetic use of color as character. His dancers, his leaves, his blue nudes—they weren’t illustrations. They were staged presences. That’s where my digital gods and masked rituals enter the frame. I use saturated color and flattened form not to depict reality, but to construct myth. Each image is a ceremony. Each silhouette is a role. Each backdrop is a set.

Fauvism, for me, is dramaturgy. It’s how I light the scene, cast the roles, and signal the emotional temperature. A red sky isn’t weather—it’s warning. A green face isn’t pigment—it’s possession. I’m not making pictures. I’m staging events.

I call it myth-making with scissors. Except the scissors are digital. And the myths are half-true.

🏖️ Palm Springs Pool Parties

Where the splash is sacred and the floaties are divine.

It was the summer of 2022. It’s always the summer when new ideas show up—usually uninvited, usually half-naked. It was 115 degrees out, and I had nothing but time. I needed something to actually create. Photos were too quick, too easy. I wanted a project that would keep me busy and, frankly, out of trouble.

So I started staging pool parties—not real ones, but mythic ones. I photographed friends in motion: dancing, floating, surrendering to the heat. Then I cut them out, masked them, recolored them, and turned them into silhouettes of joy. The pool became a stage. The sun became a spotlight. And suddenly, Palm Springs wasn’t just a place—it was a ritual.

These pieces are about celebration, yes. But they’re also about survival. About making something sacred out of sweat and boredom. About turning leisure into liturgy.

No shame. No tan lines. Just joy in motion.

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🎪 The Festival Circuit

Coachella wishes it had this kind of mythology.

I invented festivals because the real ones weren’t mythic enough. The Palm Springs (naked) Film Festival, Dance Festival, Art Festival—they’re all part of a fictional calendar where nudity is encouraged and the gods are always watching. Each piece is a poster, a portal, a party that never happened but absolutely should have.

Marco Bellamy, our resident critic, reviewed them all. He’s still recovering.

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🏛️ Man-Made Structures

Architecture meets anatomy. Things lean. Things reveal.

These works explore how buildings hold memory. I photographed bodies against desert walls, beneath brutalist shadows, and inside imagined monuments made of flesh. The Leaning Tower of Penis? Yes. The Arc de Tri-Hump? Absolutely. These are not jokes—they’re engineered revelations.

The body becomes blueprint. The structure becomes story.

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🌕 Full Moon Drum Circles

Ecstasy, firelight, and volcanic gods with excellent posture.

The full moon has its own mythic proportions in Palm Springs. There are naked hikes, drum circles, ecstatic dances—rituals that blur the line between spiritual and sweaty. So I combined them all. I took the real gatherings, the whispered legends, the desert rhythms—and layered in my own mythology.

I photographed friends mid-dance, mid-drumbeat, mid-transformation. Then I masked them, recolored them, and staged them around bonfires and beneath moons that never quite behaved. Some pieces feature gods—animal-headed, masked, invented from childhood revelations and hot glue. Others are purely human: dancers lifted by rhythm, not divinity.

This isn’t reenactment. It’s reinvention. The desert becomes a stage. The moon becomes a collaborator. And the party becomes a portal.

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Full Moon Drum Circle: Return of the Gods This piece pulls from every corner of my creative archive—photography transformed into cut-outs, theatre staged under moonlight, drumming as both rhythm and ritual, and mask-making that births new gods. It’s not just an image. It’s a convergence. Myth-making in motion.

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🌀 Final Thought

This series began in the heat—literal and emotional. Fifteen pieces born from desert light, long afternoons, and the need to make something that lasted longer than a scroll or a sigh. I didn’t know I was building a mythology. I just knew I needed to stay busy, stay curious, and stay out of trouble.

Each piece is its own ritual: a pool party reframed as ceremony, a festival invented from scratch, a tower built from bodies, a drum circle that summoned gods. Together, they form a living archive of joy, satire, memory, and theatrical truth. I used photography, masks, myth-making, and a healthy dose of absurdity to stage meaning—because sometimes the only way to tell the truth is to make it up first.

This isn’t just a collection. It’s a constellation. And if you see yourself in it—floating, dancing, masked, revealed—then the ritual worked.