Contradictions come up as quickly as one walks into PPOW’s storefront area on Broadway. Berlin-based Dean Sameshima’s “Anonymous Illness” (2024), a portray of the titular phrases that refuses to call the illness it alludes to, is paired with late activist-artist Hunter Reynolds’s “Quilt of Names (panel 2)” (1992), wherein numerous angles of documentation of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington, DC thread are collectively, explicitly naming these the illness rendered victims. Within the context of a two-person, intergenerational exhibition cast from the shadows the devastatingly poorly managed HIV/AIDS epidemic solid upon conceptions of queer sexuality, the side-by-side show represents two drastically opposed approaches to remembering the illness.
Sameshima refuses to spell out his referent: The bigger font of “illness” in comparison with “anonymous” emphasizes evasive generality, satirizing the Reagan administration’s silence and fearmongering ways. Quite the opposite, Reynolds acutely understood that naming is commonly a political gesture: AIDS’s many victims, rendered nameless or obscure exactly as a result of mourning victims undermined the state’s heteronormative agenda, are explicitly named in his woven picture tapestry of c-prints of AIDS memorial quilts. An early member of ACT UP, the artist infused low materials and the performative dimension of language with militant vitality to counter the state’s official reminiscence tradition, which threatened to deflate a plenitude of loss into impersonal statistics. Collectively, the 2 works sign to viewers that they’re strolling into an exhibition transferring between that which is specific and common in queer expertise and the incessant gaps between the 2.
Dean Sameshima, “Anonymous Illness” (2024), acrylic and silkscreen on canvas, 11 3/4 x 15 3/4 inches (30 x 40 cm) (picture: Ian Edquist; courtesy the artist; Smooth Opening, London and PPOW, New York)
This twin exhibition typically operates on the register of biographical studying, whereas concurrently resisting full readability, resulting from each artists’ methods of presenting ephemera as proof and traces of queerness as websites of emotional reality. As an example, working each alongside and in opposition to the grain of latest modes of grievance (assume, “say their names”), Reynolds’s “Ray Navarro’s Bed of Mourning Flowers” (1990/2018) pays tribute to the eponymous video artist who dressed up as Jesus outdoors St. Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the Catholic Church’s conservative teachings on sexuality by way of what are presumably photoprints of Navarro’s funeral flowers. Appendages of mourning are equally given prominence within the adjoining “Felix Bead Curtain” (2018), an assemblage of sunshine and shadow research of Félix González-Torres’ bead curtain installations about experiences of battling AIDS and approaching demise.
Elsewhere, biographical particulars are elided in favor of documentation of extra normal truths. Reynolds’s “Moon Over Gerhard (FTL Bear Daddy Beach)” (2004) transforms the sexual bravado of cruising into summary pictures capturing auras of utopian want through a grid of lengthy publicity shoots of highway indicators, neon lights, and the moon above a seashore. And Sameshima’s abstractions of his experiences of visiting homosexual porn theaters in Berlin in works similar to “Anonymous Berlin Stories” and “Anonymous Blue Movie” (2024) really feel like shrouded biography: half hidden, half revealed.
Hunter Reynolds, “Felix Bead Curtain” (2018),
photo-weaving, chromogenic prints and thread
75 1/2 x 45 1/2 inches
(191.8 x 115.6 cm) (picture by Ian Edquist; courtesy the Property of Hunter Reynolds and PPOW, New York)
Dean Sameshima, “Anonymous Blue Movie” (2024),
acrylic and silkscreen on canvas
11 3/4 x 15 3/4 inches (30 x 40 cm) (picture by Ian Edquist; courtesy the artist; Smooth Opening, London and PPOW, New York)
Hunter Reynolds, “Moon Over Gerhard (FTL Bear Daddy Beach)” (2004), photo-weaving, chromogenic prints and thread 52 x 59 1/2 inches (132.1 x 151.1 cm)
Hunter Reynolds / Dean Sameshima: Promiscuous Rage continues at PPOW (392 Broadway, Tribeca, Manhattan) by way of January 25, 2025. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
