 
Here is my work.
It either engages or it does not. It is what you bring to it. Do your premises really determine what it really is?
Not knowable.
Will you think about who you are as you judge what you are looking at?
Will you allow yourself to engage it? How? As a connoisseur? A voyeur? Both?
How many will 'allow' what we look at to alter in some way how we feel? Can we be 'polluted,' jaded?' Are we that vulnerable? Does our looking or refusing to look change our capacity to do both? I know my thinking and feeling has undergone a lot of changes since I began this work. What and who I am, might wish to be — how serendipitous is it from all the things I've seen and read?
Endeavoring this art, I did such visualizing and such imagining as to sexuality, and my own at that, believing so much of it quite impermissible utterly taboo. Yet, I allowed my imagination to free associate, go from one obscene tableau to another, imagining further alternatives possibilities. Inebriating it was, mind boggling. Daunting. But now coward, I, positing (naively perhaps) I needed not fear this — I was not an evil person nor prone to being cruel or wishing it for others in my workaday world.
Decades transpired since I'd first begun it. I've learned much that I had no clue of when I started. Time and epiphanies later bespeak I'd more to fear of my prejudices, my ignorance than of what I'd learned about myself. I am but a fractal of a larger complexity, that which is human sexuality.
Ufemisms.com is my showcase for presenting selections of works of Norman Shapiro. The two very latest are a set of artist books done collaboratively with Guy Kettelhack, the gUY & nORMAN books. These and other Book Art editions are featured here.
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