That's me in the spotlight

For his latest project, artist Alec Laughlin is studying the male form. And it's his own body in the spotlight. By Gillian Drummond. Photos by Alec Laughlin.

That's him in the bathtub. And naked at the Tucson mountainside spot of Redington Pass. Watching porn on a laptop. Standing outside, pants around his ankles, striped undies for all to see. For his latest art project - one that opens as part of Etherton Gallery's summer exhibition - painter and photographer Alec Laughlin is stripping off.

The messages are many. Vanity. Lust. Self-acceptance. Body dysmorphia and insecurity. Sex. Religion. The prevalence of, and judgement of, porn and porn use. Some of the photographs, like the pants-to-the-ankles one - in which he appears to be holding the hand of a painted figure on the wall behind him - are simply funny.

"My work, whether it's photography or painting, has always involved the human form or function. The concept around the work is not unique. These are issues we've talked about forever," says Alec. "The way I'm expressing it is hopefully a little unique."

In stripping himself and society's sexual hang-ups bare, Alec is also staying covered up. He may be shedding his clothes but he isn't exposing anything else. The person you see in the photos is far from the real Alec, he says. His choice to do self-portraiture rather than use a model meant this former actor (he worked in theatre in Santa Fe) and sometime model could create his own character.

"There came a point pretty quickly where I stopped seeing myself in the image at all," he says. Still, he acknowledges that using his own naked and almost naked body for the portraits - and a fit body at that - is risky. A friend admitted to Alec that he feared the series would be "this ego stroking kind of thing". Says Alec: "It could easily be misunderstood as narcissism."

He's still not completely comfortable with having his face and body attached to the project. "I still think twice about it, putting photos of me naked out there," he says. And by all accounts Alec is the opposite of narcissistic. "It just made sense to me to use my own body to express what I wanted to express," he says.

Alec's interest in the human form is more than artistic. It's personal. As a teenager he weighed fifty pounds less than he should have. His skinniness led to teasing (he was eventually diagnosed with celiac disease and managed to gain weight again.) Now aged 45, "I'm really comfortable in my own skin", he says, and has been for the last decade.

His own body - shown in the photo project - is that of a conventionally fit and traditionally handsome male. But that's part of the point, he says. "Something people need to understand is I don't care how good a shape you're in, you're going to have some issues about your appearance, and some insecurities." A tattoo on his abdomen speaks volumes; it spells the word 'sisu', Finnish for 'perseverance in the face of adversity'. He grew up in the American midwest hearing the phrase a lot (his family has Finnish ancestry). "That was one of the words that really stuck," he says.

Also in the Etherton Gallery show will be friends and colleagues that make up the Citizens Artist Collective (CAC), who work out of the historic Citizens Warehouse in Tucson. The Collective's members - among them Rand Carlson, Titus Castanza and Nick Georgiou -  are fighting to preserve the historic warehouse they work in. Alec edited and published a book, Citizens Warehouse, named a 2013 Southwest Book of the Year, celebrating the warehouse, the collective and the up-and-coming Warehouse Arts District in Tucson.

Here, in an airy second-floor studio of the warehouse, Alec paints, photographs and does web and graphic design. He shares that he pulled out of open studio tours that are held regularly at the Citizens Warehouse (when the public gets to visit artists' studios and buy work at discount prices) because he disliked that visitors saw some of his art unfinished.

"One of my friends here in the building said 'Face it, you'd rather get naked than have someone see an unfinished painting'. He's right," laughs Alec. "I feel less exposed with people seeing [this project] than people seeing an unfinished painting."

* The Artists of the Citizens Warehouse show runs at Etherton Gallery in Tucson starting June 16th. An opening reception and artists' signing takes place June 20th, 7pm to 10pm. More at ethertongallery.com