Stevie Hanley
My practice is centered on carrying out the Mormon mission I was
never allowed to undertake due to a failed church-led “sexualreorientation”
therapy in my youth. Engaging with intimacy,
radical empathy, cosmic retribution, and the elevation of psychic
baseness, I am, as Vaginal Davis describes me, a “dainty Satanist.”
Harnessing the power of shame, my work delineates a space both
sacred and profane, creating a sacrilege that feeds agency. The
problems raised by religion, that ancient technology of the self,
have served as creative provocation. I regard religion through
psychoanalytic and ethical lenses—a set of practices that provides
ways of relating oneself to oneself and thereby of relating that
self to the world. It is impossible to speak of the Abrahamic
religions without speaking of shame, and so my work does both,
just as addressing the holy is itself always an act of blasphemy. I
regard my studio as “The Pervert Kitchen,” taking permission and
pleasure in a practice that reclaims sites previously associated
with a sense of violation or misuse as new forms of veneration.