EMOTICON LOVER

Raw Meat Books presents "Emoticon Lover" a special presentation and exhibition by New York artist John Hanning. 

Opening Saturday, November 8, 2025, at 45 Division Street, this intimate project draws from decades of loss, love, and endurance. Recently self-published, “Emoticon Love" unfolds as a tender reckoning with memory-an offering of vulnerability and survival shaped from the artist's private archive. 

The exhibition gathers ephemera, photographs, and fragments of a generation that once thrived underground, now illuminated in fragile remembrance. Among the works are rarely seen and exquisitely delicate photographs by Dirk Rowntree, a close friend and one-time roommate of David Wojnarowicz and Nicolas Moufarrege. Some of these images of Wojnarowicz painting and tagging the Chelsea Piers in the early 1980s are shown publicly for the first time, revealing the pulse of a vanished world at its most defiant and alive. 

Curated by Kyle Quinn, the exhibition moves through the haunted terrain of remembrance, where memory becomes a living document, and survival takes the form of art. These artifacts-letters, images, gestures-trace a network of queer intimacy that resists disappearance, insisting that tenderness itself can be archival. 

At its heart, "Emoticon Lover" is a love letter to a forgotten time. Hanning's visual elegy to his late partner Frank, who died of AIDS in 1983, reconstructs fragments of devotion and grief into a meditation on persistence-on love that continues to exist beyond time's reach. 

A remembrance service led by the artist will take place at 7 PM on the evening of the opening.