LONG-TERM SURVIVOR PROJECT
Grahame Perry, Hunter Reynolds, Frank Yamrus
June 4 - July 18, 2015
Opening Reception: Thursday, June 4, 2015, 6 - 8 PM
Public Programming: Please see below
PRESS RELEASE
The Art of Pride, San Francisco Magazine, June 2015
'Long-Term Survivor Project': Perspective about AIDS, SF Gate, June 2015
Surviving AIDS with art & defiance, The Bay Area Reporter, June 2015
Review: Long-Term Survivor Project, Art Practical, June 2015
In celebration of annual Pride month and in honor of National HIV/AIDS Long-Term Survivor Day (June 5th), SF Camerawork is proud to present the Long-Term Survivor Project. Taking place from June 4 - July 18, 2015, this is an exhibition and public programing series addressing the experiences of HIV survivorship in our society.
The exhibition features the work of artists Hunter Reynolds (New York), Frank Yamrus (New York), and Grahame Perry (San Francisco). The associated public programming includes two nights of documentary photography-based projects and roundtable discussions: Portrait of Caring: Living With AIDS at the Bailey-Boushay House by Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover on June 10th, and The House of Bangy Cunts: Kiki Ballroom in New York by Anja Matthes on July 14th. As a whole, the Long-Term Survivor Project explores the history of AIDS, the current state of health, diagnosis and treatment of HIV, and the more personal, humanistic stories of those living with the past and present realities of the disease.
Hunter Reynolds creates large scale, photo-weavings of photographs and text testifying to the artist’s experience as an HIV positive gay man living in the age of AIDS. From 1989 through 1993 Reynolds collected New York Times articles and headlines about the AIDS crisis, the obituaries of those consumed by the disease, and the growth of LGBT activist movements. In 2010 Reynolds revisited this collection and began scanning, arranging, and altering them to produce a series of photo-weavings resembling quilts or tapestries. SF Camerawork will be displaying 5 of the thirty-seven pieces in the series, each one 60’ x 48.” The photographs are overlaid with images from Reynolds earlier, performance-based Blood Spot series, in which the artist extracted his own blood and dripped it over paper.
Frank Yamrus’ A Sense of A Beginning is a series of solemn and stately portraits of long-term HIV survivors. Through this series Yamrus, who has been an AIDS activist since 1991, tells the story of survivorship as manifested not only in the lines and physical attributes of his subjects’ faces, which bear subtle testimony to the effects of HIV medications, but also as a factual declaration of presence. Each person depicted in the series is alive today thanks to a complex regimen of medication and years of struggle and determination. Long-term survivorship is a story of countless physician appointments, blood draws, continually shifting drug regimes and constant monitoring of T-cells and viral loads, in the midst of untold grief watching friends and loved ones die. Through the peak years of the struggle against AIDS may have faded into recent memory, survivors live on, bearing the impact of AIDS in their everyday lives.
San Francisco-based artist Grahame Perry will present his series titled Materials of Survival. This ongoing body of work is a highly imaginative reconfiguring of the visual elements in the life of an HIV-positive survivor. Perry’s at times fantastical depictions of pills, bottles, prescriptions, vials, and other paraphernalia provide a colorful but poignant visual vocabulary with which the artist tells his own story of struggle, uncertainty, memory, and survival. Perry’s work playfully combines graphic and symbolic photographic elements in the creation of abstract images that represent the very real process of the artist’s own quest for meaning and strength in the battle against HIV.
Hunter Reynolds, Who's in Charge of the Military?, 2011, Photo-weatving, c-prints, thread. Courtesy of the artist and P.P.O.W. Gallery, New York, NY.
PUBLIC PROGRAMING
Artist Presentation & Roundtable Discussion
June 10th, 6 – 8 PM
Portrait of Caring: Living with AIDS at the Bailey-Boushay House
A presentation by photographers Saul Bromberger and Sandra Hoover on the photographic documentation of the Bailey-Boushay House, an HIV/AIDS care facility in Seattle, Washington. They will be joined by Victoria Sheridan, Frank Yamrus, Gregg Cassin (Shanti Project), and Kevin McLaughlin for a roundtable discussion.
Artist Presentation & Roundtable Discussion
July 14th, 6 - 8 PM
The House of Bangy Cunts: Kiki Ballroom in New York
Anja Matthes presents The House of Bangy Cunts, a photo-documentary project about the underground Kiki Ballroom scene in New York, followed by roundtable discussion with Anja Matthes, Grahame Perry, Mike Hickey (Shanti Project), and Jorge Hernandez (Health Eduactor and Public Coordinator, La Clinica de la Raza).
