Day With(out) Art 2023: Everyone I Know Is Sick at Real Art Ways

Above image:

Dolissa Medina and Ananias P. Soria, Viejito/Enfermito/Grito (Old Man/Sick Man/Shout), 2023.

Commissioned by Visual AIDS for Everyone I Know Is Sick

Day With(out) Art 2023: Everyone I Know Is Sick

Real Art Ways is proud to partner with Visual AIDS for Day With(out) Art 2023 by presenting Everyone I Know Is Sick, a program of five videos generating connections between HIV and other forms of illness and disability.

The program features newly commissioned work by Dorothy Cheung (Hong Kong), Hiura Fernandes & Lili Nascimento (Brazil), Beau Gomez (Canada/Philippines), Dolissa Medina & Ananias P. Soria (USA), and Kurt Weston (USA).

Inspired by a statement from Cyrée Jarelle Johnson in the book Black Futures, Everyone I Know Is Sick examines how our society excludes disabled and sick people by upholding a false dichotomy of health and sickness. Inviting us to understand disability as a common experience rather than an exception to the norm, the program highlights a range of experiences spanning HIV, COVID, mental health, and aging. The commissioned artists foreground the knowledge and expertise of disabled and sick people in a world still grappling with multiple ongoing pandemics.

Screening of Everyone I Know Is Sick will begin in our Video Gallery at 6:00pm, December 1st, 2023.

Visual AIDS is a New York-based non-profit that utilizes art to fight AIDS by provoking dialogue, supporting HIV+ artists, and preserving a legacy, because AIDS is not over.

Hiura Fernandes and Lili Nascimento, Aquela criança com AID$ (That Child with AID$), 2023.

Commissioned by Visual AIDS for Everyone I Know Is Sick

Video Synopses

Dolissa Medina and Ananias P. Soria, Viejito/Enfermito/Grito (Old Man/Sick Man/Shout)

Ananias, a San Francisco Bay Area artist and immigrant, performs the folkloric Danza de los Viejitos (the Dance of the Old Men). Originally from Michoacán, Mexico, where the dance originates, Ananias interprets its movements through the lens of his spirituality, his long-term HIV-related disabilities, and his search for a place in the world.

Dorothy Cheung, Heart Murmurs

Heart Murmurs is a poetic dialogue between the filmmaker and Dean, a young man living in Hong Kong. In reflecting on his experience living with a congenital disability and HIV during the first years of the COVID pandemic, Dean expresses his sense of self in the face of regular medical challenges.

Beau Gomez, This Bed I Made

This Bed I Made presents the bed as a place of solace and agency beyond just a site of illness or isolation. Through the shared stories of two Filipino men living with HIV, the video explores modes of care, restoration, and abundance in the midst of pandemic pervasion.

Kurt Weston, Losing the Light

Losing the Light reflects the artist’s bitter battle to stay in this world as a long-term survivor of AIDS who has lost his vision to CMV retinitis. An experimental self-portrait, the video evokes the dissolution and fragmentation of the artist’s body, representing the impact of blindness, long-term HIV infection, and the cumulative effects of decades of antiretroviral medication.

Lili Nascimento and Hiura Fernandes, Aquela criança com AID$ (That Child with AID$)

That Child with AID$ tells the story of Brazilian advocate and artist Lili Nascimento, who was born with HIV in 1990. Lili has worked to expand narratives about living with HIV beyond the limited images and ideologies that permeate the AIDS industry.

Artist Biographies

Dorothy Cheung (she/her) is a filmmaker and artist currently based in Hong Kong. Her practice explores the notion of identities and home through dual perspectives: the personal and the political, memory and forgetfulness. Her moving-image works have been exhibited internationally at Kunstinstituut Melly (formerly known as Witte de With Center for Contemporary Art), EYE Filmmuseum, and Korzo Theater, and selected for film festivals including International Film Festival Rotterdam, Leeds International Film Festival, Seoul Women’s Film Festival, South Taiwan Film Festival and Queer Lisboa.

Hiura Fernandes (she/her) is a multidisciplinary artist, cultural producer, and product designer living in João Pessoa, Brazil. Her audiovisual and performance work seeks to unite the body with cinematographic practices. Her work considers original forms of communication through the body and ancestrality as pathways to healing and embodied living. As a Black travesti, she experiences in her body and in her art the stereotypes of counter-hegemonic experiences. She seeks to understand the expressions of the body as a power capable of generating love, fear, anguish, and hate.

Beau Gomez (he/him) is a visual artist based in Montréal and Toronto whose practice is informed by ideas, challenges and conversations around cross-cultural narratives, as they relate to positions of queerness and community. His work is grounded in image-making as a conduit between individual and collective experience, giving permission to shared means of learning, nurturing, and renewal. He has exhibited projects and engaged in discourse surrounding image arts and community-building practices in various establishments, including VU Photo, Artspace Gallery, Gallery 44 Centre for Contemporary Photography, Reel Asian, Toronto International Film Festival, and Critical Distance Centre for Curators.

Dolissa Medina (she/her) and Ananias P. Soria (he/him) are the current incarnation of Grito Viejito, an artist collective devoted to queer world-mending through the adaptation of the Mexican folkloric “Danza de los Viejitos” (Dance of the Old Men). Medina, a filmmaker, writer, and organizer from the borderlands of South Texas, founded the research-creation project, which uses the Viejito figure as a vessel to hold dialogues around health, HIV histories, and queer futures. In the project’s first iteration, Medina partners with Soria, a multidisciplinary artist interested in transformative energetic expression through movement, music, and dance.

Lili Nascimento (they/them) is a transpersonal psychologist, columnist, and artist who studies and works with children living with HIV and AIDS in Brazil. They work at the intersection of art and the clinic, provoking poetic and political possibilities for existence.

Kurt Weston (he/him) is an artist working primarily with photography. He was diagnosed with AIDS in 1991 and became legally blind in 1996 due to a related condition, Cytomegalovirus retinitis. For a time he was easily identified as having AIDS due to purplish red lesions—Kaposi’s sarcoma—all over his face and body. His artwork reflects on this experience of visibility and disability, examining cultural stigmas surrounding HIV and AIDS, the disabled body, mortality, and loss. Weston’s photographs are in the collections of the Museum of Fine Arts, Houston, Museum of Contemporary Photography, and the National AIDS Museum and have been featured in exhibitions at the Kennedy Center for the Arts (Washington, DC), the Berkeley Art Museum (Berkeley, CA), and the Orange County Center for Contemporary Art (Santa Ana, CA), among others.

Please join us on Saturday, January 13th at 3pm for Saturday Soup; a discussion with Simon Benjamin and writer Gervais Marsh about Benjamin’s current exhibition sub–marine: Jeweler of Memory.

*This event is catered by Fire n’ Spice Vegan Restaurant*

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by 2022 Real Art Award recipient Simon Benjamin.

sub–marine: jeweler of memory is an installation that consists of video, photography, and sculpture. The project’s title borrows from Barbadian Poet Kamau Brathwaite’s assertation that “the unity is sub-marine” – resisting the notion of the
Caribbean as a fractured region divided by nation-state borders and language. Through the project’s lens, the Caribbean is reframed as expansive, relational, and interconnected over multiple geographies, transgressing colonial divisions.

CLICK HERE to read Gervais Marsh‘s essay on      sub–marine: Jeweler of Memory

About the Artist

Simon Benjamin is a Jamaican artist and filmmaker living in New York whose work includes experiential installations, film, photography, and sculpture. Through research, oral history, and critical fabulation, he calls attention to the contradictions entangled in the enduring myths and images of the Caribbean as tropical paradise–a carefully constructed imaginary that replaced the harsh reality of the exploitative plantation. With the intention of moving beyond critique or pointing to systems and power – he creates open-ended poetic and lyrical moving images and objects which bring together the immaterial and the tactile, which he hopes prompts the imagination of futures that exist in the notion of otherwise.

About the Real Art Awards

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2022 Real Art Awards was juried by multidisciplinary artist Carlos Motta, curator and creative strategist Yona Backer, and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2022 Real Art Awards is supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Edward C. & Ann T. Roberts Foundation.

Photo credit: Possibly in MIchigan, 1983, Cecelia Condit, Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

Real Art Ways presents a curator talk with Terri C. Smith on her group exhibition;

Tubular Times: Camp, Horror, and Music Television: Video Art 1981-1993

The gallery walk through and talk will begin at 3:30pm on Saturday, December 9 – free admission.

During the talk, Terri C. Smith will give an informal walkthrough and description of the exhibition at 3:30pm for approximately 30 minutes. There will be time for questions with Smith until 5pm.

Real Art Ways presents a group exhibition of Video Art curated by Terri C. Smith

Tubular Times is a group exhibition that features significant video art made from 1981-1993. The show also includes thematically related satellite installations with newer works by contemporary artists Am Schmidt and Willie Stewart. The historic component will be on view in the main gallery and black box room and will feature approximately twelve artists, including Peggy Ahwesh, Max Almy, Ericka Beckman, Dara Birnbaum, Cecelia Condit, Cecilia Dougherty, Ulysses Jenkins, Nam June Paik, Ann Magnuson, Pipilotti Rist, Willie Stewart and Michael Smith.

The exhibition is inspired by Vestron video, which was a production company and VHS distributor located in Stamford, Connecticut in the eighties and early nineties. Sharing qualities with Vestron’s catalog of B-horror, music video, and campy humor, many of the works in Tubular Times layer comedy, horror, and music to address 1980s political themes in the U.S., including the AIDS crisis, a growing wealth gap, and Reagan-era backlash to the civil liberties of the 1960s and 1970s. The show’s title references: cathode-ray tube (CRT) televisions used in the 1980s; that decade’s saying “totally tubular”; and phonetically suggests the word turbulent. 

1981 was the first year of MTV and the first year of the AIDS epidemic, setting much of the tone for a decade. It’s not surprising, then, that the video art of the 1980s exhibited a unique mix of urgency, desperation, camp, and techno celebration. In the video art of that era, gender identity, a sense of life-and-death urgency, theatricality, satire, and experimental digital techniques coalesced. During this time, we see irreverent divergences from the conceptual video art of the 1970s which, while often addressing socio-political themes, was rarely directly influenced by television and movies. With cable television growing in the mid-1970s and being in sixty-percent of American houses by 1992 and with VHS bringing movies into the home, the topographies of entertainment shifted dramatically during this time. Video editing also became more sophisticated, allowing artists to appropriate imagery from pop culture. 

Vestron’s catalog was a mix of comedy, satirical spoofs, and thriller/horror genres. The company also was involved in music videos and released Making of Michael Jackson’s Thriller. Vestron is best known for the film Dirty Dancing, but other movies they released include: quirky comedies like Earth Girls are Easy and The Princess Bride; horror movies such as Slaughter High and Horror Hill; and comedy-horror films such as Sundown: the Vampire Retreat and Lair of the White Worm. For some of the artists in Tubular Times, horror—a genre inextricably linked to VHS—becomes an allegory for the othering of the LGBTQ+ community as well as the systemic failure and loss of life during the AIDS crisis, which was further exacerbated by Reagan-era policies that centered cisgender, heteronormative, white, capitalist ideals. The resulting ethos of these videos is to varying degrees harrowing and hysterically funny.

Due to conflicting events, this exhibit will be closed on the following dates:

December 2nd, 2023

December 3rd, 2023

December 10th, 2023

January 7th, 2024

Max Almy, “Perfect Leader”, 1983, Courtesy Electronic Arts Intermix (EAI), New York.

About the Curator

Terri C. Smith is a curator with more than twenty-five years of experience at accredited museums and small, nonprofit art spaces, curating approximately eighty contemporary exhibitions and receiving three, multi-year grants from The Andy Warhol Foundation for the Visual Arts, among other awards. She received national recognition for her work as the founding creative director of Franklin Street Works, an award-winning, critically recognized nonprofit art space that built community in and brought internationally exhibiting artists to Stamford, Connecticut from 2011 to 2020. Her practice often focuses on intersections of conceptual art and social justice themes as well as experimental art practices. Smith’s exhibitions have received positive reviews in artcritical, Art Papers, Artforum, The Brooklyn Rail, Modern Painters, among others.

Please join us on Friday, December 8th at 5:30 pm for an artist talk with Adrian Martinez Chavez on his exhibition El Disco Es Cultura at Real Art Ways.

Guests will have an opportunity to engage with the exhibition, while Adrian Martinez Chavez gives an overview of the works in show, discuss his progression of working with photography, and how his artistic practice incorporates time based media through films and the slideshows. The presentation of this exhibition is paired with both the audio of the kitchen and the music his father would be listening to while working. A DJ booth also becomes its own piece that draws from his family’s origins in Monterrey, Mexico and its Cumbia and Sonidero culture and history. This work is a mix of Cumbia music played live with vinyl records the artist has been accumulating from the Northeast of the US to South of Mexico. During his talk, Martinez Chavez will discuss the DJ booth and his relationship to music in relation with his family history and its place in Mexican/American culture. Guests will have the opportunity to learn more about the history of Cumbian music in relation to listening to the records through the booth.

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by 2022 Real Art Award recipient Adrian Martinez Chavez.

Adrian Martinez Chavez’s El Disco Es Cultura explores Mexican culture in northeast United States.  The photographs and videos exhibited center around Adrian’s father, owner of Monte Albán Restaurant in Hartford, CT.  His work offers an intimate portrayal of immigrant labor and a celebration of his family’s history.

About the Artist

Adrian Martinez Chavez is an artist and DJ working in photographic, audio, and video mediums. Adrian’s work centers around intimate views of immigrant communities and daily life.  He received his BFA from the Hartford Art School and an MFA from the Yale School of Art. Adrian has been the recipient of multiple awards and grants from the Connecticut Office of the Arts, Greater Hartford Arts Council, The New York Foundation for the Arts and the Houston Center for Photography.  Adrian currently lives and works in New Haven, Connecticut.

About the Real Art Awards

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2022 Real Art Awards was juried by multidisciplinary artist Carlos Motta, curator and creative strategist Yona Backer, and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2022 Real Art Awards is supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Edward C. & Ann T. Roberts Foundation.

Real Art Ways presents a solo exhibition by 2022 Real Art Award recipient Ying Ye.

Through her work, Ye links food, labor, and the body to themes of cultural identity, intergenerational trauma, and systemic oppression experienced by many Asian Americans. Throughout Burn the Midnight Oil, Ye examines the use of soybeans in the making of tofu (especially in the form of fragile tofu skin), referencing the process as a metaphor for her family’s experience as Chinese immigrants and workers in the food industry. Combining elements of performance, sculpture, video, and text, Ye looks toward community building and shared resources as a way to heal from the stresses of life under capitalism.

About the Artist

Ying Ye is an interdisciplinary Chinese artist who incorporates her family’s tradition of cooking into her work. Ye’s work addresses the “burden that younger generations of Asians and Asian Americans [experience] in American culture.” Ye has exhibited at venues including Farmington Valley Arts Center, Five Points Gallery, and the Ely Center of Contemporary Art in New Haven. Ye earned a BFA in Painting and Sculpture from Hartford Art School at the University of Hartford in 2019.

Artist Talk Thursday, 10/5 at 5:30pm with Billie Lee of the Hartford Art School:

Ying Ye will discuss her artistic practice and delve deeper into her exhibition Burn the Midnight at Real Art Ways. This artist talk will combine elements of performance and discussion. Ye will perform part of her interactive piece of the exhibition – creating traditional dishes made of tofu and offering them to audience members. After the performance, she will delve deeper into her artistic practice and the making of Burn the Midnight Oil with University of Hartford Professor Billie Lee. Audience members will also have an opportunity to ask Ye questions about the work.

About the Real Art Awards

The Real Art Awards is an annual opportunity for emerging artists living in New England, New Jersey, or New York. The open call, offered with no entry fees to artists, attracts hundreds of applicants each year, of which 6 artists are chosen. Selected artists receive a solo exhibition, with a commissioned essay, professional documentation, and a cash prize of $2,500. The 2022 Real Art Awards was juried by multidisciplinary artist Carlos Motta, curator and creative strategist Yona Backer, and Real Art Ways Executive Director Will K. Wilkins. The 2022 Real Art Awards is supported in part by awards from the National Endowment for the Arts and the Edward C. & Ann T. Roberts Foundation.