Artists

The architect of the untouchable. Cochran — an architecture major by training — builds the structures history was too afraid to finish, and armors them so they cannot be unmade. His Coexist is engineered like a bunker: steel stick frame, polymer clay that cures as hard as steel, gold leaf, oil paint — and, fused into the material itself, the artist's own body: his pubic hair forms the Prophet Muhammad's beard — placed there, in his reasoning, so that no one would dare lay a hand on the work. The taboo is the bodyguard. The sculpture depicts Pope Benedict XVI enthroned at St. Peter's, receiving fellatio from a Hasidic Jew — while the Prophet Muhammad, reverse cowgirl, masturbates onto the Qur'an. Every Abrahamic faith in one frame, none of them spared. It exists because his earlier work — Skyscraper, a Qur'an from a Muslim gift shop, gold-leafed and stitched onto an American Standard dispenser, shown at the Religion Is Poison exhibition at Cueto James Art Gallery — was destroyed by a wine-throwing visitor. Harry took the wine-soaked piece into the bathroom to clean it and returned without it. Waste not, want not — he used it. The night before that same opening, he built Barbie's Last Supper: a plastic relief of the most sacred meal in Western art, bought for pocket change at a Catholic church bazaar, its apostles recast with Barbies, the table running with resin blood, the arches mounted with pages cut from gay magazines — glued, in the artist's own words, with his semen. He laughed almost the entire time he made it. It sold at the show. Most artists vandalized retreat. Cochran hardened. He is currently completing the Temple of Baal — the temple on Epstein's island, unfinished in fact — in steel, resin, enamel, and gold, as a private commission that will never be shown. He doesn't have a five-year plan. He has a current obsession, pursued until it is steel and gold and unignorable. This house watches what he finishes next.

James Perez does not work in multiples. Every piece he makes is unrepeatable by design — painted on real American flags, Pride flags, and Mercedes hoods. Set with genuine diamonds. Gilded in 22kt gold. Built around human remains. These are not materials chosen for effect. They are the effect. You cannot print what Perez makes. You cannot manufacture it. The object itself carries the weight — and that weight is deliberate. His imagery provokes. His materials confirm it.