The minute I walked into Promiscuous Rage I was overwhelmed with emotion. Tears welling. I walked up to the front desk and said, about Hunter Reynolds, ‘he was my friend, and I miss him.’
In the exhibition at P·P·O·W, Reynolds’ (1959-2022) photo weavings and installations are on view together with paintings by living artist Dean Sameshima (b.1971) reflecting their experiences of being gay men living through the AIDS crisis, and its horrors. Reynolds captures his own and his community’s memories in a material way, through elements woven and sewn together you are forced to remember glimpses and fractions of time and place. Memories that previously would have been left to gather dust in some photo album, stored on a shelf, occasionally picked up and flipped through in a person’s personal and private space become larger than life in his work. These are mementos from people whose lifestyle choices were erased by families and ignored or marginalized by the healthcare system. While Sameshima’s work is a warning of what could happen when having to live anonymously.
Reynolds was open with his AIDS/HIV diagnosis, not hiding in the shadows from a society that disregarded him. He used his life and lived it to the fullest as a way to connect, to be an activist, and to make himself be heard and seen. His work Dialogue Table 3, My First Year Out, (performed during the run of the show) which took place between 1987 and 1992, was the genesis of his archival presentations. It was a performance or interactive work where Reynolds placed and arranged objects on tables in his studio. He soon realized that his work and the conversations they sparked were the work itself—the everyday things, just being seen and listened to. While Sameshima uses references and titles from books, queer, and art historical texts from his archive and gives them new life and exposure in his paintings. As a queer person, I see the archive as a place of understanding myself and recovering and remembering the history and people I will never have the chance to meet. An archive of a queer person is radical as its existence supports societal change.
In the series on view, Sameshima also pulled inspiration from his archive, but unlike Reynolds work, which is linked to specific individuals, Sameshima’s Anonymous Portrait series which he began in 2018 allows the viewer to review their own experiences, memories, and fantasies in his paintings. ‘Anonymous’ gives the viewer permission to place themselves in that place. Reynolds uses the material and ephemera from his archive forcing users to engage with memory and history. He encapsulates events and objects, like a lamp or flowers put on graves and given to loved ones at a funeral into a gallery space.
Just like a blanket wraps around a person to keep them warm, mentally I feel myself wrapped in the embrace of the world of Reynolds and how he saw it and took it in. In his works, he makes his visual eye available to us, objects he interacted with, seen from various angles reminding someone how there is not just one way to look at an object like a lamp (Mary’s Lamp, 1997) and the space it occupies, the reality in which it resided. Through that, he somehow recreated the feeling of being present in that moment with all the blurs and crisp moments of clarity.
Even writing this tears are falling on my keyboard, Reynolds showed the beauty within his community and the overwhelming sense of loss that he experienced. People were dying and archiving their lives as well as his own was a defiant act. He was not going to allow those he lost to be erased, they lived. He was not going to allow society to erase his experiences, he documented them and displayed them unashamed for everyone to witness and learn from.
I feel anger, I feel pain, I feel fear in this new political reality, but I feel hope and community when looking at these works together. We will not be erased, Hunter will not be erased, and Dean will not be erased. If we continue to relook at our community’s past, to our own recent personal past, we can plan and have hope for our future. We are not anonymous and our histories are valid and important.
When seeing Reynolds’ works presented on hospital-like beds, I was reminded of visiting him in January 2022 at the hospital where, in a sick bed, he was talking about his practice; describing the works he wanted to create and the archive that would be his legacy. Before he passed I worked with him to organize his archive; the concept of the archive, especially the physical one, is so important in understanding the past, present, and future. How does one take in the things they witness? What becomes saved and documented? What does it say about that person, and yourself? These are questions that Reynolds explored since his HIV diagnosis including in his performance practice which was not on view. These questions are raised in Promiscuous Rage.
Projecting and trying to connect to ourselves and others is a human trait, Reynolds’ works are tender gestures and a testament to the acts of sharing that were necessary when we were almost eradicated by the unresponsive government system that closed their eyes to the struggles and deaths of minority groups within their population. Reynolds’ and Sameshima’s works feel more vital now than ever, in the early days of our new political reality, during a presidency that already is resulting in resources for queer folks being taken away.
Hunter Reynolds / Dean Sameshima: Promiscuous Rage on view at P·P·O·W Gallery 392 Broadway through January 25, 2025.