'Life After Death: Embracing the Queer Widow' at Space 743
John Killacky
Bay Area Reporter, June 21, 2001

For over 20 years, we have lived among the hungry ghosts of those gone too soon. Before we had a name for the swollem lymph nodes, malaise, wieght losses, night swaets, fevers, recurrent infections, lesions and rare tumors we were experiencing, we had to organize ourselves against indifference and contempt. At first, anger helped us cope with the homophobia, fear,and loathing around us, as our forlorn reality of ravaged lives and slow anguished lives and slow anguished deaths escalated. How many nights did we gather around wasted bodies filled with fluid-filled lungs gasping for breath as dementia and morphine obfuscated any goodbyes?

From the onset of the pandemic, we created personal works to vent our rage while commemorating our lost loved ones. We made art as much for for ourselves and friends as for a broader public. In our rituals we found community in a society that refused to recognize our mourning.

Yet the fervor in gathering and naming of our losses is dissipating in this third AIDS decade. How long can we grieve when there are so few remaining to reminisce with us? Almost an entire generation of gay men have been lost. Those of us left behind are fatigued, and the media has move don, but the battle is not over.

With 22 million dead and counting, the plague is still with us. We cannot forget and we must continue telling our unfinished stories to anyone who will listen. In one of his last speeches before his death, film historian Vito Russo said, "Remember that someday the AIDS crises will be over . And when that day has come and gone, there will be people alive on this Earth: gay people and straight people, black people and white people, mean and women, who will hear that once there was a terrible disease, and that a brave group of people stood up and fought and in some case died so that others may live and be free.

Artists have always been on the front lines of the AIDS war with cultural, social and ploitical agitprop work. Adding to this leagacy is a new multidisciplinary project, Life After Death: Embracing the Queer Widow, organized by Dan Pillars in collaboration with seven other artists. It shows at Space 743 through July 28.

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The participants began meeting last February to discus the notion of queer widows and why they aech identify as such. The resulting work on view is a poignant amalgam of literary, video, and visual pieces,including Mike Richard's sculptural tableaus incorporating photographs, Douglas Morris' gaily painted abstract portraits, Kerry Rutz's well-crafted paintings, and Tim Clare's heart-shaped shield made of tina and nails.

At the entrance we are greeted with Yves Moralex's wailing wall constructed from kleenex boxes. Within the gallery, he installed a series of Canopic Boxes drawn from Ancient Egyptian mummification practices, Chuck Forester wrote a series of poems, mounted above a drafting table with some of his late partner's drawings. Dan Pillar's incorporated dolls,dried flowers, and a widow's dress, mounted behind glass etched with eligiac prose.

At the center of the exhibition are two collaborative works created by all the artists. One forms a circle with two-sided panels. On the outside, we see expressions of external grief. When we enter inside, we witness their unresolved emotions. Here visitors can share their thoughts on blank postcards as part of Jim Cross's sewn panel.

The other collaborative piece is a memento cae of objects from the artists' deceased partners, which contain great sentimental value. Within is a poem by Cross, with a line which best sums up the queer widow's project: "Being granted no rituals in which to grieve, we struggle to find our own way."