The Ross Laycock Initiative for the Exploration of Science, Art, AIDS

On the occasion of the archive’s transition and as part of our end-of-year fundraising campaign, Visual AIDS is launching a special initiative to honor Ross and reflect on the confluence of science, art, and AIDS that he embodied.

This web gallery features artwork from the Visual AIDS Artist Registry that explores the intersection of science, medicine, and art. Since the beginning of the crisis, art has been a way to make visible what has been hidden from view — not only the immense loss and pain that has been shrouded by stigma, but also the microscopic, viral, and immunological realities that are invisible to the naked eye. Artists have helped us visualize, understand, and communicate these invisible registers of our bodies, foregrounding our porousness and interconnectedness. 

Visual AIDS Artist Member Carl George shares more about Ross below:

Ross Laycock, my indomitable gay brother, the prankster, the exuberant athlete and opera buff, the very embodiment of a certain kind of Canadian sprezzatura, is the inspiration for this new and exciting project at Visual AIDS, a vital arts organization both Ross and his life partner Félix González Torres, supported.  

I met Ross in 1978 while we were students at McGill University – he a science major, and me, art history; then, in 1980, Ross moved to New York to study menswear design at the Fashion Institute of Technology but soon realized he’d rather buy clothes than design them. I arrived six months later. As different as two young gay men could be, I felt deeply bonded to Ross because he represented a kind of unfettered freedom I had never known or understood, and for him, I was the brother he never had. 

He eventually returned to Canada, became involved with the activist group Aids Action Now, and, in 1989, organized direct actions at the Fifth International AIDS Conference in Montreal, co-writing a manifesto of demands activists issued to the government of Canada. He then waited tables at one of Toronto’s finest restaurants and studied to become a licensed sommelier, all the while continuing his science studies at the University of Toronto. Ross died of AIDS related illnesses in 1991, just one credit short of his achieving a master’s degree in biochemistry. 

Ross met Félix González Torres in New York City 1983. They adored, inspired, and balanced each other in a love affair for the ages. Ross, with his training in science, explained to Félix the many complexities of HIV – deepening their bond and assuaging some of Félix’s fears about what we all knew was coming. In 1992, Félix, by then a celebrated artist, and armed with this knowledge, created a series of drawings based on his blood work results, a source of constant anxiety for all PWAs during those years before antiretrovirals.