Contradictions arise as soon as one walks into PPOW’s storefront space on Broadway. Berlin-based Dean Sameshima’s “Anonymous Illness” (2024), a painting of the titular words that refuses to name the disease it alludes to, is paired with late activist-artist Hunter Reynolds’s “Quilt of Names (panel 2)” (1992), in which various angles of documentation of the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington, DC thread are together, explicitly naming those the disease rendered victims. In the context of a two-person, intergenerational exhibition forged from the shadows the devastatingly poorly managed HIV/AIDS epidemic cast upon conceptions of queer sexuality, the side-by-side display represents two drastically opposed approaches to remembering the disease.
Sameshima refuses to spell out his referent: The larger font of “illness” compared to “anonymous” emphasizes evasive generality, satirizing the Reagan administration’s silence and fearmongering tactics. On the contrary, Reynolds acutely understood that naming is often a political gesture: AIDS’s many victims, rendered anonymous or obscure precisely because mourning victims undermined the state’s heteronormative agenda, are explicitly named in his woven photo tapestry of c-prints of AIDS memorial quilts. An early member of ACT UP, the artist infused low material and the performative dimension of language with militant energy to counter the state’s official memory culture, which threatened to deflate a plenitude of loss into impersonal statistics. Together, the two works signal to viewers that they are walking into an exhibition moving between that which is particular and universal in queer experience and the incessant gaps between the two.
This dual exhibition often operates at the register of biographical reading, while simultaneously resisting full clarity, due to both artists’ strategies of presenting ephemera as evidence and traces of queerness as sites of emotional truth. For instance, working both along and against the grain of contemporary modes of grievance (think, “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 outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the Catholic Church’s conservative teachings on sexuality through what are presumably photoprints of Navarro’s funeral flowers. Appendages of mourning are similarly given prominence in the adjacent “Felix Bead Curtain” (2018), an assemblage of light and shadow studies of Félix González-Torres’ bead curtain installations about experiences of battling AIDS and approaching death.
Elsewhere, biographical details are elided in favor of documentation of more general truths. Reynolds’s “Moon Over Gerhard (FTL Bear Daddy Beach)” (2004) transforms the sexual bravado of cruising into abstract photography capturing auras of utopian desire via a grid of long exposure shoots of road signs, neon lights, and the moon above a beach. And Sameshina’s abstractions of his experiences of visiting gay porn theaters in Berlin in works such as “Anonymous Berlin Stories” and “Anonymous Blue Movie” (2024) feel like shrouded biography: half hidden, half revealed.
Hunter Reynolds / Dean Sameshima: Promiscuous Rage continues at PPOW (392 Broadway, TriBeCa, Manhattan) through January 25, 2025. The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
