David Jester graduated with a Bachelor of Fine Arts from Virginia Commonwealth University in 1996 and completed his graduate studies at Rutgers University, New Brunswick, NJ in the same year. Although his degrees are in sculpture, for the past four years he has been working on a series of paintings that explore queer identity. As he recalls, he enjoyed swimming while growing up, but what drew him to pools was the way they isolate the bodies from sound, movement, and even gravity, creating a group of people that become their own community, even for a moment in time, in another “world” with its own rules of time, space, and color. This is how Jester sees the gay community: separate, but at the same time part of a larger world.