Two Artists Show Their Perspectives On HIV

Left to right: Jonathan Suro's Peter and Denied. Photos courtesy of the New Haven Pride Center. 

The tire holds 100 metal nails on the inside. On its side, it appears as if it is melting away, leaving a puddle of melted rubber on the ground. It oozes across the white tile.

John Suro’s Peter is one the works in Artistic Perspectives on HIV, running at the New Haven Pride Center through Dec. 31. The show is an intimate look at the way Suro and fellow artist Jonathan Joseph have folded their experiences living with HIV into their work.

It is available by virtual tour or by appointment. Due to COVID-19, the center is still closed to the general public. For more information, check out the center’s website.

“I think that especially for people in the queer community, the arts are an unique way to express many things that get bottled up inside,” Joseph said in a discussion on the show earlier this month.

While the works are largely abstract, each is full of meaning. Peter, for instance, is titled in honor of Suro’s first partner. He explained that the tire’s circular shape is meant to represent the human body slowly dying and decomposing. The nails represent the human immunodeficiency virus, or HIV.

In a talk that accompanied the exhibition, Suro said that the loss of people in his life caused him to lose the will and inspiration to make art. He found that inspiration again when his doctor and pharmacy messed up his prescription medications. It led him to create Denied, a multimedia piece of artwork featured in the show.

Denied depicts six black pill bottles, arranged in a circle atop a turntable. Each has a single letter written on it, spelling out the word “D E N I E D.” As a viewer spins the table around that the bottles sit on, they see that four of the letters are in a different color, spelling out the word “D I E.”

Left to right: Jonathan Joseph's With Every Fiber of Your Being and Into The Woods. Photos courtesy of the New Haven Pride Center. 

In the middle is a bottle of the prescription medication Suro takes for his HIV, which he had a hard time getting. The piece shows in real time how convoluted and upside down the healthcare system is for many living with chronic illnesses.

Suro said that he sees a line from his work to more explicit forms of activism. He referenced the SILENCE=DEATH Project, the brainchild of six artists (Avram Finkelstein, Brian Howard, Oliver Johnston, Charles Kreloff, Chris Lione, and Jorge Socarrás) trying to raise awareness around HIV and AIDS in 1987. Over three decades, later, the posters are still instantly recognizable with their pink triangles and bold white text.

“The poster ... had a huge effect in encouraging activism and the activism of Act Up and that activism art was art in itself and took the form of performance art in their protests and street installations,” he said.

Joseph added that he sees the best art as omnipresent, rather than constrained to galleries or deep-pocketed, upper class patrons. He said that “I think that’s why representation matters,” including work by queer artists and those who are living with HIV and AIDS.

Joseph’s Stolen Moments shows colors moving from dark to light. When talking about the piece, the artist described it as "stage three" of living with HIV. He called stage three the stage in which a person understands that they have the virus, but does not let it control them.

“Say, ‘yeah this thing happened to me, this exists, this is a part of me,’” he said. “But it’s no longer being from a place of ‘I have been forever changed by this.’ It is now being explored through the lens of I am stepping into my power about this.”

In the painting, there is a burst of bright color beside a ball of black. The artist said it’s as a nod to those quick moments of remembering and being upset about a situation.

“What my work is trying to do at least in this collection is to ask the viewer to sip from that river of forgetfulness for themselves and find the common threads that tie what they would choose with what I have chosen as the subject matter,” he said.

Jewel Booker is a senior at New Haven Academy. This piece comes to the Arts Paper through the Fall 2020 cohort of the Youth Arts Journalism Initiative (YAJI), a program of the Arts Council of Greater New Haven. This year, YAJI has gone virtual due to the COVID-19 pandemic. Read more about the program here or by checking out the "YAJI" tag.