In her essay “Video Remains: Nostalgia, Technology and Queer Archive Activism,” Alexandra Juhasz discusses the importance of “queer archive activism” in preserving the lives of queer folks. Speaking in reference to her own documentary Video Remains, Juhasz explains, “It is not our suffering that is compelling but our willingness to name and record it, and in so doing, make communal and move into the present” (328). Continue reading
“Writing & Drawing Are Sister Arts,” announces banners flowing from an old-timey quill pen on a drawing in Nayland Blake’s solo exhibition #IDrawEveryDay at Matthew Marks Gallery. Even though this proper, decadent illustration, culled from a book of 19th century penmanship exercises, seems at odds with the bulls, bears and bunnies in the surrounding drawings, the work, titled 6.1.15, acts as the show’s manifesto. As with the sister arts of writing and drawing, Blake reveals how daily drawing practice can record a visual memoir. Continue reading
At a panel last July entitled IV Embrace: On Caregiving and Creativity, organized by Visual AIDS in conjunction with the show In The Power Of Your Care at The 8th Floor, Ted Kerr observed that we are in “the revisitation phase” of the HIV/AIDS pandemic. And Kerr is right. While smaller exhibitions have been mounted … Continue reading
How do you measure a life? Through jars full of trash gathered during trips to Bourbon Street, Rodeo Drive and the King’s mecca, Graceland? Through a smattering of graveyard dirt collected from the graves of loved ones? Through precisely written tags on toothbrushes and assorted tchotchkes, saved for decades? Through a 585-page inventory? Well, according … Continue reading
Depression, despair, despondency, longing, melancholia and heartbreak are unlikely emotions to trumpet at a time when anger and righteous indignation seem like the only affects we’re allowed to access for mass resistance and protest. Continue reading
In her essay “Legacies of Trauma, Legacies of Activism” in the collection Loss: The Politics of Mourning, Ann Cvetkovich reflects, “The AIDS crisis, like any other traumatic encounters with death, has challenged our strategies for remembering the dead, forcing the invention of new forms of mourning and commemoration. The same is true, I would argue, … Continue reading
Mirroring Hartman’s invocation of the ghosts of slavery to transform the present, Cy Gavin’s current exhibition At Heaven’s Command at Sargent’s Daughters enacts a similar personal and political pilgrimage. Rather than Ghana, Gavin’s vibrantly beautiful yet historically rich exhibition renders the results of tracing his own personal lineage to Bermuda. Continue reading
Describing his later series Kandors, an extended reflection on Superman’s shrunken birthplace, Mike Kelley explains, “Kandor is a constant reminder of Superman’s lost homeland and functions metaphorically as a symbol of his alienated relationship to the planet where he now resides…Kandor now sits, frozen in time, a perpetual reminder of his inability to escape that … Continue reading
Like Douglas Crimp’s seminal essay, Sean Strub’s Body Counts reflects both mourning and militancy, as well as everything in between, allowing the emotions connected to both queer sexuality and the AIDS crisis to be archived from shame to pride to love to guilt and immense grief. Continue reading
Using the varying notions of skin from universal solitary confinement to a marker of identity to a means of communication, artist Martha Wilson and independent curator Larry List investigate the role of skin in art in their fabulously filthy titled exhibition Skin Trade at the P.P.O.W. Gallery. Continue reading