Survival AIDS is a new series of works that incorporate elements spanning 25 years of my image making, and constructed around my experience as a gay man living in the age of AIDS. I have been living as a person with HIV and AIDS since 1984. I began to express this experience in my art practice beginning in 1987, at which time I also became a member of ACT UP. For my upcoming exhibition, Survival AIDS, I am combining three modalities that I have used in various ways in my work over the years: the Blood Spot series, Mummification Performance Skins, and Photo Weavings. In the early ‘90s I did a series of performances in which I extracted my own blood and dropped it onto paper, creating an abstract image from my diseased blood-body. I then scanned a single perfectly shaped spot of blood to use as a vehicle, to cleanse and reclaim it in various forms in my artwork. Between 1989 and 1993, I clipped every newspaper article and advertisement that I came across in the New York Times and other newspapers that had anything to do with AIDS and LGBT culture. During my career, performance art has been another mode of working. My drag alter ego, Patina du Prey; The Memorial Dress; my Mummification Performances; and The Goddess Within Dervish Performances are all sites in which I use my body as a transformative vessel to process and present, through my art, the emotional and physical experience of AIDS in my life and in the world around me. Survival AIDS is an installation combining three of those elements: the Blood Spots, the Mummification Performances, and the archival newspapers used to create large scale Photo Weavings. Read more and learn how you can help out here.
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