A Queer Month in the Visual Arts
Report from San Francisco Galleries
Will Shank
Bay Area Reporter, June 21, 2001

Two queer- related exhibitions at local galleries dominate the art landscape during this Month of Pride. Life After Death: Embracing the Queer Widow is a ground-breaking installation that addresses, perhaps for the first time, the identity of the survivor of a gay union which ends in death. As part of the National Queer Arts Festival 2001, eigth local creative people, among them performance artists, sculptors, poets, singer/songwriters, and painters, were chosen for this juried exhibition, which continues at Space 743 through July 28. A central circle of panels is a metaphor for the "embrace" of the outsider, The Queer Widow, and each artist has presented an "inner" panel representing his own feelings, and an "outer" panel, which is the face he presents to the world.

The collaborative circle is surrounded by the individual works of these bereaved artists. There are tear-jerkers, and poet Yves Moralex has prepared the visitor for them , with his welcoming "Wailing Wall," made of bricks of black kleenex boxes. And ther are objects of sheer beauty like Dan Pillars' life-size memento mori boxes whose glass lids are atched with poems of grief and hope. But there is also humor in, for instance, Tim Clare's "The Look," a sly Jackie O tribute in which dark sunglasses symbolically replace the widow's veil. The tragicomic duality of the subject is summed up in a wonderful piece by Clare, a tondo portrait of a small dog, surrounded by a vortex of text which reads, "My lover Went to Heaven and All I Got Was This Darn Chihuahua."