
Dirty David
During my earliest teen years, I felt riveted to the erotic male form, yet my innocent suburban universe afforded no pornography of any kind, and - this being the ice age before the internet - there was no way for me to otherwise gaze directly at men's nakedness without getting caught.
I recall how, while making my way across a field near my home one day, I came across a torn-out magazine scrap of advertising that had gotten snagged along a fence. The ad was selling lawn statuary, and featured a poorly rendered plaster copy of Michelangelo's David that got about right, at least, the sculpture's sensuous abdominals and tellingly undersized genitals.
I was electrified to obtain this dirty image, and to be able to inspect it directly in private. I smuggled the scrap into my home and, for some years thereafter, kept it carefully hidden in my bedroom, tucked into the back pages of an old Boy's Life.
TITLE - "Dirty David"
WHERE - Cement sculpture factory, Burnaby, British Columbia (2015)