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Hunter Reynolds, DRAG, Simon Watson Gallery, New York, 1990. “He bore witness to how a powerful and supremely creative voice can raise the visibility of long-term survivors who continue to inspire us. All of us at Visual AIDS honor Hunter as an artist, advocate, activist, collaborator, mentor, provocateur, visionary, and friend.” “For decades, Hunter Reynolds’ work and life bore witness to the unflinching fierceness of compelling, authentic art making and advocacy,” Patrick Owens, a board member and former president of Visual AIDS, told ARTnews in an email. In 1996, Reynolds updated the Memorial Dress to include the names amassed over three years with the assistance of the arts nonprofit Visual AIDS. At each staging, Reynolds exhibited the Memorial Dress with a guest book in which visitors to the exhibition could add the names of loved ones who had also been lost to HIV/AIDS. In photographic documentation, Patina du Prey stands on a pedestal, her arms raised as she allows people to grasp the depth of the loss. I did six weeks of performances almost daily and it changed the direction of my work, connecting to the body and spirit, with the dress as a spiritual vortex to the universe.”Īfter its debut, Memorial Dress almost immediately began to travel widely, with Reynolds often staging performances in it. “People found the names of their friends on the dress and began crying, having cathartic events in front of me. “I wasn’t prepared for the intensity of it,” he said. The work first showed as part of the ICA Boston’s groundbreaking exhibition “Dress Codes.” Reynolds told Another Man in 2019 that he hadn’t anticipated how much of a chord the work would strike.
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With all the names listed in this way, the amount of loss feels at once incomprehensible and tangible.
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The columns upon columns of names go on and on, seemingly infinite. That eventually led to Memorial Dress, a black ball gown with those 26,000 names screenprinted in gold onto the dress via a laborious process.
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Hunter Reynolds, Survival AIDS Series 2 (ACT UP Chicago with Memorial Dress photographed by Maxine Henryson), 2015. He decided that in order to honor those who had died he had to recite their names, so using the catalogue of the NAMES Project AIDS Memorial Quilt, he recited some 26,000 names as part of a performance from a hospital bed. Those years were some of the worst of the epidemic,” he said of those days. “I didn’t know if I would be alive in two years or not. Hundreds of thousands of people were dying. It was still three years before antiretroviral therapy would no longer make an HIV-positive diagnosis a death sentence (for those who have access to it). A collaborative exhibition with artist Chrysanne Stathacos, dedicated to Surrealist artist Méret Oppenheim, came in 1992, where Patina’s Banquet Dress debuted.īut, it was in 1993, when he moved to Berlin for a residency at the Künstlerhaus Bethanien, that Reynolds began creating the works that Patina would become best known for.
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Around this time, he began a photographic series titled “Drag Pose” that solidified what would become Patina’s signature look: a full face of make-up, no wig, no breasts, and a hairy chest peeking past a deep-cut gown. The following year, Reynolds staged a major performance as Patina du Prey in a group exhibition at Andrea Rosen Gallery, about six months after it had opened. He went out in “half drag, with a feathered hat and chest hair on display.” The evening did not go as planned: “I figured, ‘It’s 1989 in New York City-it’s not going to be a big deal.’ Astoundingly, I was met only with aggression.” It was an October night and there was an opening at the Kitchen that evening. Inspired by the drag queens who regularly performed at the Pyramid Club, one of the East Village’s legendary haunts, Reynolds was experimenting with “the feminization of my male face-putting on makeup and taking pictures, which I had never done before,” he recalled in a 2019 interview with Artforum. With the advice of artist Ray Navarro (the two had attended L.A.’s Otis College at the same time and became friends in New York) in his head of not letting the disease control or define him, Reynolds went on to make the era’s most poignant and powerful reflections of the actual toll that HIV/AIDS had brought to the country’s queer communities. Courtesy the Estate of Hunter Reynolds and P.P.O.W, New York