Cruiser II

12"x12"x2"; laser cut and engraved plywood and white oak veneer with leather strap and paint; 2024

Cruiser II is a marquetry recreation of a photograph taken outside Milwaukee Pride in 2024, marking the artist’s first Pride experience within a kink and leather space. Captured after meeting friends at a leather pageant, the image reflects a moment of self-assuredness and visibility, leather shorts, harness, and body occupying public space without apology. The photograph was taken outside This Is It, the historic Milwaukee bar later closed in 2025, with the very construction element posed against cited as part of the reason for its closure. In this way, Cruiser II functions as both personal portrait and quiet memorial to a vanished queer site. Constructed from plywood with an inlaid figure of white oak, the work emphasizes material contrast: the vertical grain of the body against the horizontal grain of the ground. The white oak burns and chars at a different rate, deepening shadows and echoing the black frame and single leather strap affixed to the surface, an allusion to the harness worn, and to endurance, pleasure, and presence.