La Galleria: Everyday

Everyday explores the AIDS crisis (historically and currently) through the lens of artwork that looks at and evidences daily experiences and practices in response to HIV/AIDS. Everyday is co-presented with Visual AIDS, a contemporary arts organization that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.

The exhibition includes artwork and ephemera by Babycastles, Anne Balsamo, Barton Lidice Beneš, Jean Carlomusto, Curtis Carman, Paul Chisholm, Ian Clyde, darkroom danny, T De Long, Chloe Dzubilo, Delphine Fawundu-Buford, fierce pussy, Avram Finkelstein, Peggy Frank, Fuck Laws Flash Collective, Gay Men’s Health Crisis, Carl George, Felix Gonzalez-Torres, John Hanning, Eva Hayward, Edward Hochschild, Mark S. King, Kia Labeija, Carol Leigh, Nancer Lemoins, Gin Fong Louie, Dale MacDonald, Joyce McDonald, Juanita Mohammed, Ray Navarro, Luna Luis Ortiz, Grahame Perry, Poster Virus, LJ Roberts, Randy Freedomclay Rogers, Fábian Rios Rubino, Ivan Safrin, Dudley Saunders, Loren Schmidt, James Simmonds, Michael Slocum, Southern Living AIDS Quilt, Zara Steadman, Hugh Steers, Nelson Sullivan, Justin B. Terry-Smith, Prashast Thapan, The NAMES Project, James Wentzy, Frederick Weston, Jessica Whitbread, Jon Winet, Albert Winn and Tanya Wischerath.  

Image: Chloe Dzubilo & T De Long, Untitled (Medical Alert Necklace), 2009, Handmade pills (polymer clay, acrylic paint) on metallic cord with gold clasp. Photo credit: M. Sharkey.

CURATORIAL STATEMENT

AIDS is an everyday experience. By this, we mean it is both common and ongoing; quotidian and unending. Yet its history – like all history – is being written in Boldfaced Names and Significant Dates, especially those from the near past. Like the moon that eclipses the sun because it is closer to our frame of reference, the enormity of that moment of the AIDS crisis threatens to blind us to both the sprawling present and the unknowable future. Moreover, the significance of this artist or that day is always less than the significance of the cumulative reality of life in the time of AIDS.  

In EVERYDAY, we bring together work that engages with the “now” of AIDS, both historically and currently. Some of the work uses the materials of AIDS, from pills to pamphlets, while other pieces chronicle daily responses, from protest to prayer. Much of the work speaks in the vernacular of its own moment, whether that be wheatpaste, VHS, or an app. Some of it is made by professional artists whose gift is to speak of and to the world around them, while other pieces were made by intuitive creators who were driven to respond to the crisis as one mode of survival – the same spirit that drove us to make this exhibition.  

Someday we will have a cure, and the infrastructure and political will to get it to everyone who needs it. But until then, AIDS is EVERYDAY.

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