Image 1 of 1
My practice uses photography, printmaking, and collage to confront the ongoing impact of HIV and AIDS on queer life, memory, and survival. Working with my own HIV-positive body as both material and subject, I bring bodily traces into contact with medical documents and images pulled from queer archives. My work considers how queer bodies have been recorded, desired, stigmatized, and remembered, particularly at a time when access to healthcare remains increasingly uncertain and subject to political decisions. Printmaking is central to how I approach these questions. Through methods of exposure, contact, pressure, and transfer, I translate bodily traces across silver gelatin prints, etched surfaces, and other print processes. Blood becomes image, texture, stain, and abstraction. Moving between these processes allows the body to remain physically present while becoming difficult to fully read or contain. Collage brings these traces into contact with fragments of vintage gay pulp novels, pornography, and ephemera from my HIV treatment. These materials carry histories of queer desire, intimacy, illness, and survival. Bodies emerge from and dissolve into printed surfaces, while clinical language is broken apart and recontextualized. Bringing these fragments together allows me to explore the complicated relationship between desire and illness, as well as the ways queer bodies have been made visible, regulated, and erased. Much of my process comes back to contact. Light exposes silver-sensitive paper, acid bites into a plate, pressure transfers ink, and collage physically joins images separated by decades. These processes allow the living and the dead to occupy the same surface. Each exposure and impression leaves a trace, building images that hold personal experience alongside a larger history of queer survival. I think of the matrix as a place where these histories can gather and be carried forward. It can be bodily, photographic, or printed, but it always holds the possibility of another image. Repetition becomes a form of insistence: returning to these traces, reworking them, and keeping them present. Through printmaking, I am trying to preserve a visual inheritance while confronting the conditions that continue to make queer health, care, and survival precarious.