CA: The list of my artistic influences would be long, but the artists I keep returning to are Joel-Peter Witkin for his tableaus of divine and sexual bodies, both living and dead, in intense states of beauty, ecstasy, and suffering - Pierre et Gilles for their glittering painted photographs as an almost opposite condition of being from Witkin’s as cosmetic artifice being real face seen through the mask. Matthew Barney’s Cremaster Cycle showed me the operatic scale art can become and the exquisite perversion that is a force of endless creative potential. Alexander McQueen and Eiko Ishioka created costumes and adornments that are sublime testaments of how beautiful humans can become if they drag themselves into the creature of their imagination. Race and identity are very important to me in my work - Kara Walker’s horrific and perverse silhouettes perform the complex and plural power dynamics of blackness and whiteness. Michael Ray Charles is wonderfully blasphemous towards the whitewashing so prevalent in our American culture – his work is a shocking reminder of how contrived and codependent our identities are.