featured gallery for August 2006

Between Ten

Visual AIDS is proud to present the exhibition "Between Ten" in conjunction with the XVI International AIDS Conference in Toronto, Canada, from Aug. 13-18, 2006. The exhibition showcases the work of seven artists bracketing the 10 years since the introduction of HAART (highly active antiretroviral therapy) in 1996. "Between Ten" provides an insightful look into diverse works by artists who continue to live with HIV/AIDS. This Web Gallery is a selection of some of the works included.

Albert Winn is a Los Angeles-based photographer who has been documenting his changing body and Jewish identity for over a decade in the series My Life Until Now, included in the exhibition are Self-Portrait with Scott, 1991; Tony From the Writing Group, 1996; After the Cocktail, 2000; and Before My Fourth Sculptra Treatment, 2006.

From San Francisco, Joe De Hoyos has been creating paper collages culled from magazines for almost 20 years, recycling and re-appropriating images to speak about AIDS, sex, family, and American life. In the series Eulogy, he creates memorials to those who died of AIDS, such as Keith Haring, Al Parker, Ryan White, and Sylvester. His collages convey his ideas in poetic terms, as in Rainbow Viral Load, which speaks of AIDS, but, as De Hoyos states, "visually it is composed of graphic dots and tiny images of various objects -- the dots being the 'virus' and the objects being the 'load.'"

Nancer LeMoins is a printmaker from San Francisco whose works have directly addressed AIDS activism and her experience living with HIV with urgent images and text, like AIDS Isn't Over?, Sleep Cry Eat, The Only Devils, and Death and Decay. LeMoins states, "Art for me is the purest portrait of any time or event. I want very strongly to assure that this epidemic is understood and remembered as humans who lived through it, as their lives and pain, emotions and deaths, and not simply as statistics in a history book."

Luna Luis Ortiz is a photographer and AIDS activist from New York City. He began photographing "after I became HIV positive in 1986 at age 14, since then I started to document my life through self-portraits," including Glow Toy and Pensive State. Later he turned his attention to his friends. His portraits show the constructed glamour and tender beauty of his life in the ballroom community.

New York City-based Eric Rhein was one of the first 10 artists to join the Archive Project. His ongoing Leaf Project pays tribute to people the artist has known who died of complications from AIDS. Rhein says, "The project which began in 1996 with tributes to 80 individuals now numbers some 170, mirroring the ongoing AIDS struggle." In his series Anthropomorphosis, his delicate wire drawings and constructions represent the transformative relationship among human, nature, and the spiritual world.

Stephen Andrews is a Toronto-based, conceptual artist. His body of work is diverse in theme and form, but often re-appropriates images from the media and repositions them to discuss chance, mortality, and memory. In his Weather series, landscape images of clouds and storms, see Storm Front, are printed on pig intestines and allegorically address the daily shifting of emotions across a psychological landscape. On Message is a series of some 30 drawings creating a short animated video, in which images and text are shuffled and reshuffled to tell four different stories. The drawings re-create the look of four-color reproduction through the use of a homemade separation technique, and are done as rubbings using window screening and crayons.

Steed Taylor is based in New York City and has exhibited his photography, drawings, and site-specific, public works internationally. Of his series Missing, Taylor states, "While trying to address my AIDS diagnosis and fold this information into my art practice, I decided to explore what my life would look like if I was removed from it. Focusing on the most romantic and bucolic time of life, childhood, I selected the warmest photographs of my childhood. I marked myself out of these images, then cropped and enlarged and re-photographed them." Some examples of these include Watching TV, The Little Car, and Catching Tadpoles. Taylor's ongoing site-specific Road Tattoo memorials are "composed of cultural designs previously appropriated to mark skin and placed in locations of individual or community significance." His most recent Road Tattoo, Messenger, is a tribute to NYC bike messengers.

Between Ten
SPIN Gallery, 1100 Queen Street West, Toronto, Canada
August 14-18, 2006
Reception: Tuesday, August 15 from 7:00 - 9:00 pm

AIDS2006 -- International AIDS Conference
XVI International AIDS Conference, Toronto, Canada
www.aids2006.org