Conditional Love
The hypocritical nature of religion allows toxic masculinity and hypersexualiztion in media to exist while preaching righteousness through words and deeds.
Pictured:
Conditional Love: The Eyes Of A Well Adjusted Adult, 2014, Digital Collage.
Conditional Love
Conditional Love is a digital collage series shaped by social media, armchair philosophy, and disposable culture. I work with found images and discarded objects with a story already inside them.
I take them apart, rearrange them, and let new meanings surface. However, these images were found floating through the Internet, discarded clip art CDs, and embellished with digital drawing. In this series, those meanings revolve around four forces that run so powerfully through our society: white supremacy, toxic masculinity, the saturation of sexualized imagery in our media, and the moral contradictions within organized religion that allow these forces to thrive.
White supremacy sits at the center of this work. It is an invisible architecture that shapes daily life even when it goes unspoken. In these collages, I treat it as both a structure and a shadow, something that organizes our social landscape while pretending not to exist. By bringing together images pulled from digital debris and mass culture, I expose how whiteness quietly positions itself as the default and the ideal. I want viewers to confront the ways this system infiltrates our language, our stories, and our bodies, and to recognize that dismantling it begins with learning to see it.
Toxic masculinity is a strange inheritance we have all received, one that teaches men to hide their fear and tenderness behind a hardened surface. In these collages, I bring together symbols that clash and resonate, revealing how fragile that surface really is. I want viewers to see the emotional cost of performing strength and to recognize that vulnerability is not a threat to identity but a path back to our humanity.
The constant push of hypersexualized media forms another thread. Our visual world is drenched in desire as commodity, a language that turns bodies into products and intimacy into spectacle. By pulling these images out of their usual context and setting them against scenes of their emotional aftermath, I trace the quiet harm this kind of representation leaves behind. The goal is not accusation but awareness. It is an invitation to look again at the images we take for granted and consider what they demand from us.
Against this backdrop sits the complicated presence of religion. Many of the same institutions that preach compassion and integrity also make space for the very cultural toxins they claim to resist. In Conditional Love, these contradictions are not shouted but revealed through contrast. Religious imagery appears alongside the forces it quietly enables, making the tension between proclaimed values and practiced realities impossible to ignore. The work asks what spirituality could look like if it aligned with the kindness it claims to champion.
At its core, Conditional Love is about confronting the stories we have been handed and choosing which ones we want to keep. I build these collages as a way to question inherited beliefs and encourage viewers to do the same. My hope is that these images spark conversation and reflection, and that they open a space where love, acceptance, and morality are no longer restricted by unspoken conditions but shaped by honesty, empathy, and a willingness to grow.
