Play Smart V

Inspired by the exhibition Queer Threads, the fifth edition of Play Smart is curated and designed by John Chaich and features original artwork by Ben Cuevas, Rebecca Levi, Charles Long, Maria Piñeres, L.J. Roberts and Nathan Vincent. Play Smart features fun, sexy and creative trading cards, packaged with condoms and lube. The back of each Play Smart trading card features honest and straightforward information to promote harm reduction, HIV testing, pre and post exposure prophylaxis as well as raise awareness around HIV/AIDS advocacy. Sew-on patches by Charles Long and L.J. Roberts are a new addition to Play Smart V.

Play Smart bios and artist statements:

John Chaich is a New York-based curator, designer, and writer. Beginning his career as an HIV testing counselor and community educator, he has designed a range of multi-arts projects to raise AIDS awareness, from an educational theatre project funded with support from Do Something and LifeBeat, to a nationally distributed edutainment zine by and for young adults, to social marketing campaigns recognized by Print magazine. He has presented at national conferences on AIDS and the arts and has written on visual responses to HIV/AIDS for Art & Understanding magazine, as well as contributed the catalogue essay for Fleshing Out the Grid: David Wojnarowicz and Hunter Reynoldsfor P.P.O.W Gallery. With Visual AIDS, he has designed all of the Play Smart cards as well as the book Not Over: 25 years of Visual AIDS. In 2011 and 2012, he curated the Visual AIDS exhibition Mixed Messages: A(I)DS, Art + Words at LaMaMa LaGalleria in Manhattan and Washington DC. His most recent curatorial project, Queer Threads: Crafting Identity & Community, debuted at the Leslie-Lohman Museum of Gay & Lesbian Art in Manhattan in 2014, and will travel to the Maryland Institute College of Art in December 2015. Chaich holds an MFA in Communications Design from Pratt Institute. www.chaichcreative.com

"The artists featured on the Play Smart cards were first shown together in the exhibition Queer Threads: Crafting Identity and Community that I curated, and here they’ve lent both new and existing work to this series. Commissioned for Play Smart, Visual AIDS artist member Ben Cuevas has hand-knit a larger-than-life Truvada pill, allowing scale to amplify attention to PrEP treatments while building a parallel between the daily hobby of craft and the daily regimen of medications. Nathan Vincent’s knit sculpture Pink Protection uses shape that resembles both a condom and a bullet and color that replaces gunmetal grey or pale latex with distinctively queer fuchsia to explore the concept of protection through the shared language of weaponry and prophylactics, military defense and safer sex. Maria Piñeres and Rebecca Levi both appropriate gay beefcake images in their embroidered portraits. Paired with information about HIV criminalization on this card, we can see Piñeres’ cowboy and leatherman as sexual renegades, while Piñeres also alludes to the textiles and patterns—leather, suede, flannel, and plaid—that form the gay social fabric. Levi’s Breakfast Bear is inviting and clever: look closely and see how the embroidered stitched line is perfectly suited to convey the scars of a top surgery; with a nudge and a wink, the trans male figure holds a skillet of eggs at his pelvis. L.J. Roberts’ patch extends the ideas of community and connectivity that are prominent across their work. Charles Long, a Visual AIDS artist member, provides an arresting, punchy, and necessary message. Having designed the Play Smart series since it’s inception, I’m honored that Visual AIDS invited me to curate the work and theme this year. Through humor and handiwork, these artists show us how needle and thread are as life affirming as condoms and lube."

Ben Cuevas is a Los Angeles based interdisciplinary artist, born in Southern California in 1987. He picked up knitting as a hobby in his early 20's and quickly realized the sculptural capabilities of the craft, later incorporating it into his work as a fine artist. He studied in Amherst, MA, and received a degree in Mixed Media Installation Art from Hampshire College in 2010. Following graduation, he was awarded an artist's residency at the Wassaic Project, an arts collective in New York State, where he knit a complete human skeleton. Cuevas's work has been shown in group and solo exhibitions at galleries, museums, and alternative spaces in the U.S. and internationally. www.bencuevas.com

“My work spans a wide range of mediums including installation, sculpture, fiber, photography, video, performance, and sound. In light of its pluralities, I see my work as a reflection on the condition of embodiment, exploring what it means to have a body, to inhabit a body, to be a body incarnated in, and interacting with this world. Knitting is a recurring element in my practice, which I use to blur the lines between art and craft while queering its historically gendered connotations. These ideas are reflected in the form of Knit PrEP, a sculptural work commissioned for the Visual AIDS trading cards. As a male-bodied, gender-queer, HIV positive artist, it is an honor to be a member of an organization like Visual AIDS, which allows me to put my politics into action, spreading awareness of HIV, safer sex practices, and sex-positivity through my art.”

Rebecca Levi was born in New York City, and resides in Brooklyn. She received her BA from McGill University in Montreal. Her embroidered portrait "Two Ladies" was part of the Queer Threads exhibition at The Leslie-Lohman Museum in 2014. Additional group and individual shows of her embroidery and pen-and-ink work have included Soho Gallery for Digital Art (New York), Four Eleven Studio (Provincetown), Katharine Mulherin Contemporary Arts Projects (Toronto), and Galapagos Art Space (Brooklyn). www.rebeccalevi.com

“In my embroidered portraits, I subvert the norms of the medium with the unexpected, inviting a collision between traditional handicrafts and the untraditional themes of queer identity and gender performativity. My work is influenced by images in found photography, mid-century magazines, and 1970s porn. In the Bear Series, I reinterpret the art of vintage homoerotic physique magazines for contemporary "bear" gay male culture, substituting hirsute and hefty for smooth and svelte. Where once were boys modeled on the Greek ideal, I conjure men at ease in their mature masculinity, often in homey and eroticized contexts. Breakfast Bear epitomizes this with his winsome smile, hairy chest, and offering of a hot meal. It's an honor to have an opportunity to support Visual AIDS with this work.“

Charles Long is a Chicago born and based artist. He studied at Columbia College of Chicago and spent the first cycle of his life dedicated to a wide swath of social justice practices in all number of not for profits. He recently has stepped away from "the movement" as an every day focus of life and career, and is attempting a return to a practice of making.

"I am concerned with creations that have impact, ones that drive viewers/participants to be called to action. This action can be as subtle as a moment of reflection that results in disgust or joy, as long as it is felt, we are talking. Our legacies as queers, as people of color, as the disabled, as the proud, as those who lived, is of vital importance. Recording and creating through our existence will save us now and well into the future."

Maria E Piñeres is a Colombian born American artist best known for embroidery. She graduated from Parsons School of Design with a BFA in illustration. Her work has been exhibited at various museums and group shows including The Museum of Art and Design in New York and The Scottsdale Museum of Art. She is currently working on a collection of portraits for a show for 2015 at the Walter Maciel Gallery in Los Angeles, where she shows regularly.

“For the past decade my artistic medium has been the decorative craft of needlepoint; I enjoy the sense of tangible process, the laborious appearance, the saturation of color. My inspiration comes from all forms of contemporary popular media: music, television, movies—particularly celebrity culture and advertising. I often depict gay male bodies and themes of sexuality. I feel that the queerness of my work stems from a place of organic self-expression more than political intent or theoretical practice. Like many lesbians, I find a sort of gender-ambiguity or power equality in the representation of gay male sexuality that more readily translates as erotic than images of heterosexual or even lesbian coupling. I have so much respect for the Visual AIDS mission and feel honored to participate with this community of artists and activists.”

L.J. Roberts is an artist and writer whose studio practice incorporates a wide range of textile techniques and recently filmmaking. Their work has been shown nationally and internationally in such venues as The Smithsonian Museum of American Art, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, Vox Populi, La Mama Gallery, The Miller Gallery at Carnegie Mellon University, Leslie Lohman Museum of Gay and Lesbian Art, Oakville Galleries, The Bag Factory, and A.I.R. Gallery. Currently their work can be seen in the nationally touring exhibition Alien She and in the exhibition Disobedient Objects at the Victoria and Albert Museum in London.

"I approach working in textiles with a political urgency. Activism entwined with critical queer/transgender politics, feminist histories, and the on-going AIDS epidemic deeply drives my work. From the shirts worn during protest marches, to the AIDS quilt, to punk zines and patches, I am interested in materialities that mark political histories. The socio-economic-political and laborial circumstances of textiles, both in concept and material, become the root of re-imagining queer representation and alternative histories. My practice employs a wide spectrum of textile methods positioning highly technical skills alongside amateur techniques to (re)imagine ideas of mastery and utility. Recent works include large scale quilted and knitted installations, single-strand four by six inch embroidered portraits and jacquard-woven banners."

Nathan Vincent’s artwork has been exhibited in museums and galleries across the United States and abroad. He holds a BFA from SUNY Purchase and has been awarded artist residencies from 7Below (2013) and The Museum of Arts and Design (2012), as well as the competitive West Collects Prize (2008)www.nathanvincent.com

“From objects to installations, my work utilizes the processes of knitting and crochet, by hand and machine, to explore the permissions of gender as well as power and aggression in relation to our perceived cultural roles. Pink Protection comes from a series of prophylactics that could also act as missile covers: referencing ideas of protection and simultaneously softening the force that often accompanies so-called "masculine" actions. I am honored to be working with Visual AIDS and alongside these artists to provoke dialogue around HIV/AIDS.”