7714 North Sheridan Road
Chicago, IL 60626
Hunter Reynolds: Survival AIDS /
Ryan M Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz: Herma
October 25, 2014 – January 17, 2015
Gallery 1
Hunter Reynolds: Survival AIDS
For over twenty years Reynolds has been using photography, performance and installation to express his experience as an HIV positive gay man. He was an early member of ACT UP, and in 1989 co-founded Art Positive, an affinity group of ACT-UP to fight homophobia and censorship in the arts. His work addresses issues of gender, identity, socio-politics, sexual histories, mourning, loss, survival, hope and healing.
Reynolds first showed his series of Survival AIDS weavings at Participant, Inc. in May of 2011. The works are comprised from c-print grid-collages of scanned newspaper clippings that Reynolds began collecting between 1989 and 1993. The clippings were grouped by formal and thematic connections with additional layered images that reference Reynolds’ modes of artistic practice; spots of his HIV-positive blood; portraits of Patina Du Prey, his gender-fluid alter ego that spun through the streets of Potsdam, New York and Los Angeles; and images of his mummification performances in which he is wrapped in cellophane and tape that forms a skin which is displayed after he emerges. Through his layering of media, Reynolds has abstracted messages and infused his own images to create a space within the work where experienced and report, artist and audience, and present and past exist simultaneously. Roger Denson, in his 2011 Huffington Post article, goes on to explain Reynolds' intentions behind the series, "To expand on and counter the negative tenor and misinformation of these early articles in hindsight, while seemingly warding off the traumatic memories of prejudice, indifference, and religious superstition that greeted the ostracized and dying HIV positives of those years.”
Hunter Reynolds was born in 1959 in Rochester, Minnesota. Reynolds is a AIDS activist and a Visual AIDS artist member. Hunter Reynolds has been the recipient of grants and residencies, including several Pollock Krasner awards. He has had numerous solo exhibitions including: P.P.O.W Gallery, Participant Inc., Hallwalls, Buffalo, NY; White Columns, New York, NY; Artist Space, New York, NY; Simon Watson Gallery, New York, NY; Creative Time, New York, NY; New York, NY; Momenta, Brooklyn, NY; Bernard Toale Gallery, Boston, MA; ICA Boston, Boston, MA; Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, San Francisco, CA; NGBK Berlin, Germany; and DOCUMENTA, Kassel, Germany. His work is numerous public and private collections including The Society for Contemporary Art Chicago, IL; Yale University Art Gallery, CT; the Addison Gallery of American Art, MA and The Stamp Gallery at the University of Maryland, MD. The Fales Library and Special Collections/New York University recently acquired the archives of Hunter Reynolds for its Downtown Collection.
Hunter Reynolds is represented by P.P.O.W Gallery, NY. For more information about the artist please contact: info@ppowgallery.com
Gallery 2
Ryan M Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz: Herma
Ryan M Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz are collaborators that live and work in Chicago. Drawing from their research into prehistoric & ancient art, historical erotica, and esoteric traditions, their works synthesize concerns about sex, death, myth, transformation, and alchemy. They view the act of collaboration as the dissolution of individual identities and union of oppositions as a new, harmonized whole.
http://pfeifferwalz.tumblr.com
PRESS
Portrait of the Artists: Ryan M Pfeiffer + Rebecca Walz
(Collin Pressler, Newcity)
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