I’m Sorry I Keep Saying I’m Sorry, But I’m Sorry
Cranbrook Academy of Art

Year: 2025
Materials: Tattoo, Black Light
Cranbrook Academy of Art

I’m Sorry I Keep Saying I’m Sorry, But I’m Sorry considers queer intimacy as a provisional social structure, one produced through the accelerated conditions of nightlife, desire, class, risk, and masculine identification. The installation begins with an encounter with two men at a Detroit bar and the hours that followed in their home. Recently released from prison, the men occupied a social and cultural position adjacent to, but distinct from, my own. Over the course of a single night, sexual intimacy gave way to an improvised ritual: the three of us tattooing the same anarchy symbol onto our thighs, using the same needle and ink.

The tattoo becomes less an image than an inscription of temporary affiliation. Three bodies, previously unrelated, are made to carry the same sign. Its conventional associations with political resistance become destabilized by the circumstances of its production. The symbol instead functions as evidence of proximity, a vernacular contract authored directly onto the body. What might ordinarily require accumulated history, trust, or kinship is compressed into a few nocturnal hours.

I continued tattooing myself. I inscribed GOOD BOY, and I’M SORRY I KEEP SAYING I’M SORRY, BUT I’M SORRY into my skin. The gesture shifts from collective marking to private repetition. Apology becomes compulsion, and language becomes corporeal. GOOD BOY operates somewhere between affirmation, submission, discipline, and the desire to be recognized. I’m sorry similarly oscillates between confession and reflex. Repeated beyond its communicative necessity, apology becomes a linguistic tic, a mechanism for negotiating one's presence in relation to other men.

The installation reconstructs the encounter without attempting to represent it coherently. Video documentation of the tattooing is dispersed among embroidered fox skins, lace doilies, black-light flashlights, fluorescent screen-printed language, photographs, and objects that move between domestic decoration and masculine vernacular. Under ultraviolet light, language becomes simultaneously hypervisible and difficult to decipher. Fragments appear, disappear, and are interrupted by lace. Illumination becomes an obstruction as much as a revelation.

Detroit matters to this construction not simply as the geographic location of the encounter but as a cultural condition within the work. Blue-collar masculinity, car culture, incarceration, economic precarity, neighborhood bars, tattoos, and vernacular codes of male affiliation constitute a particular architecture through which intimacy becomes possible. Within this architecture, queerness does not necessarily announce itself through recognizable cultural signifiers. It emerges through proximity, recognition, humor, sex, vulnerability, and the temporary suspension of boundaries between strangers.

The work is interested in the peculiar velocity of these encounters. Queer nightlife can produce an intimacy disproportionate to duration. Someone can move from stranger to sexual partner, confidant, collaborator, and memory within hours. These relationships may disappear almost immediately, yet leave physical and psychic residues that persist long after the people themselves have become inaccessible.

Here, the tattoo is the most literal residue. It transforms an encounter that might otherwise dissolve into anecdote into something carried indefinitely on the body. The mark collapses the distinction between archive and flesh. Documentation no longer describes an event from a distance; the body itself becomes its evidentiary surface.