Fear on Their Faces
Description
Fear on Their Faces (page 7) is a work from Hunter Reynolds’s “Survival AIDS” series. Between 1989 and 1993, the artist clipped and archived articles he encountered concerning the LGBTQ community and, in particular, the topic of AIDS. To make this work, Reynolds scanned and enlarged news stories focused on familial relationships among gay children and their heteronormative parents, or children whose parents were dying of AIDS. The artist then wove these clippings together with more personal artefacts: a photograph of the artist as a teenager smiling on the beach with a friend, the lipstick signature of the alter ego Reynolds created as a performance artist, and images he superimposed of his own HIV-positive blood.
Large and public in scale, this work offers an intensely personal glimpse into an individual’s efforts at reconciling dissonant experiences of the AIDS pandemic, both as a person living with the disease and as a consumer of mass media that is often characterized by its impersonal and detached reporting.
Large and public in scale, this work offers an intensely personal glimpse into an individual’s efforts at reconciling dissonant experiences of the AIDS pandemic, both as a person living with the disease and as a consumer of mass media that is often characterized by its impersonal and detached reporting.
Creator
Hunter Reynolds
Date
2011
Rights
Courtesy of the artist
Original Format
Photo-weaving, c-prints and thread
Physical Dimensions
48 x 60 inches
Files
Citation
Hunter Reynolds, “Fear on Their Faces,” Contemporary Art Purchasing Program - Stamp Gallery, accessed December 31, 2024, https://contemporaryartumd.artinterp.org/omeka/items/show/70.