Monica Majoli's oil paintings and more recent watercolors hauntingly engage issues of sexuality, mortality and transcendence. Although they commonly include explicitly sexual imagery, their emphasis is on the psychological aspects of physical experience. Majoli first gained recognition for her meticulous oil paintings of gay male sexual encounters that documented experiences related to her by a close friend. Later, Majoli focused on her own sexual identity, and began to execute self-portraits of herself engaged in group or solo sexual acts, using dildos as props. Here, the dildo acts as "a site of longing and limitation, as locus of both desire and absence," Majoli has said.