In 2017, I exhibited a solo digital photo collage show entitled "Would You Kiss a Faerie?" It was held at the Artiszen Cultural Arts Center, a non-profit in Vallejo, California run by brother and sister art/ community advocates, Sean and Dominique Gutierrez. The show took place during the local LGBTQIA Pride Week, and I was excited to present this show to celebrate diversity and love. It was a milestone for me as it had taken over two decades to complete. Lady Chimmerly, the writer of the verse for which the art was originally created, performed and helped promote the show, along with many of the artists and models photographed: Christian Cegavske, Jaina Bee, Linda Hagood, Kaosmic Kitty, Adolfo Alcala Manuel, Verlannia Manchester and Neal Stewart aka Lemurr. Local photographers Ken Szutu and Bill Yuen took amazing photos of the event and honorable Mayor Bob Sampayan of Vallejo joined in the fun on opening night. I was struck by the way people would come into the gallery to gather and lend a helping hand out of the goodness of their hearts. I look forward to returning to Vallejo, a town north of San Francisco that is building a vital arts community.

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The image featured above is one of the artworks from the show. It was crafted from a black and white image on Kodak film that was then scanned and inserted into Adobe Photoshop software. When I started the project, the technology I had available made imaging slow and laborious. It would take minutes just to make an image rotation because of its size and high resolution. After decades, I finally  had the printing and imaging tools needed to easily and quickly render high resolutions with many layers and colors.

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Of all of the artwork in the show, the image above has traveled the farthest. It is of performance artist dear friend and social raconteur, Vaginal Davis, and was featured in England's Tate Museum member's program book for a story about the artist.