Xerx is a very good friend and a magical floral designer. He was also one of the people I spent a lot of time hanging out with when everything was shut down. I had met Xerx in 2018 when my best friend at the time, Javy, started dating him. I remember the first day I met him, the first thing he did was excitedly pick me up and Xerx is TALL. Javy and I had a piece at Congruent Space for Glamour Girl’s Amuse Bouche art show and my cousin and her wife, Coral had came in from Grand Rapids for opening night. We all drove together in a car and I remember Xerx asking Coral for a piece of mentos gum, she extended it out to him and he ate it straight out of her hand. Xerx made it very easy to be comfortable being unhinged, we’ve done so many things together that I won’t mention here, the point is I’m very comfortable with Xerx.
On this day he picked me up and we headed to the studio. At the time I didn’t know the extent of what Xerx was going through, he shared a few things, frustrations and pains in his romantic relationship, that I now know were much larger than he had initially mentioned to me that day and we talked about it. I too was going through my own relationship woes at the time and we cried in the car, a good little cry that day before this shoot. Xerx is also a gay man, I feel like it’s an important detail to mention, I wasn’t out here confiding my relationship sorrows to a straight man.
When we got to the studio Xerx had taken out two floral crowns he had made. They were beautiful. I love the way Xerx plays with flowers, at the time he had been working at the floral depatment of Wholefoods, and was using that to fund some of his more personal floral experiments. He would make these beautiful experimental arrangements he kept in his home, and we would often find ourselves admiring them and their compositions while being stoned on a weekend night.
He had ordered the flowers for the crowns from a supplier online and then spent a day arranging them, before storing them in the fridge for safe keeping. We didn’t have much of a plan for the shoot, the idea was I bring some clothes and we creative direct as we go, it was just us two and we’re good at just figuring it out.
Xerx and I have a good little collaborative thing going, we both understand the importance of spontaneity so this was a fun little shoot together. He had me posing with my mouth slightly open in a fictional moment of ecstasy, I laid on the floor and blankly stared into space so it looked like I was dead, some of the shots were very overtly sexual, but it was so fun playing this character. This photo I share here is my favorite one from the bunch, it’s softer, more reserved, and when I look closely at my eyes I can still see remnants of the tears shed that day LOL.
March 18, 2021 at my studio in Mana Contemporary
