“Memorials to Queer Loss by Hunter Reynolds and Dean Sameshima”
**Inside “Promiscuous Rage”: A Dual Exhibition Exploring Queer Memory and Activism**
Art has long served as a powerful tool for social commentary, documentation, and resistance. Few moments in contemporary history have demanded such urgent artistic intervention as the HIV/AIDS epidemic, which decimated communities while governments remained passive or complicit. In *Promiscuous Rage*, Hunter Reynolds and Dean Sameshima—a late activist-artist and a Berlin-based creator, respectively—navigate the intergenerational experiences and expressions of loss, identity, and queer resistance tied to this crisis. On display at PPOW Gallery in New York City’s Tribeca through January 2025, the exhibition invites viewers to contemplate the interplay between private mourning and public activism, as well as the enduring complexities of queer memory.
### Contrasting Approaches to a Shared History
From its entrance, the exhibition juxtaposes two distinct but harmonious strategies of remembering the HIV/AIDS epidemic. Sameshima’s *Anonymous Illness* (2024) is a stark acrylic and silkscreen painting with text, its refusal to explicitly name the disease reflecting the erasure and euphemisms promoted during the Reagan administration’s silence. By minimizing specificity and amplifying evasiveness, the work critiques the weaponization of ambiguity—an approach that rendered AIDS victims invisible within society at large.
In contrast, Reynolds’s *Quilt of Names (Panel 2)* (1992) explores hyper-specificity. This intricately woven photographic montage documents the AIDS Memorial Quilt in Washington, D.C., an activist project that not only humanized the epidemic’s victims but also amplified rage against political and social complacency. The quilt transforms impersonal statistics into an intimate repository of identities, aligning itself with Reynolds’s belief that naming those lost is an inherently political act—one that affirms humanity in the face of erasure. Together, these works anchor the exhibit, oscillating between subtlety and directness, personal mourning and collective rage.
### The Ephemeral as Evidence of Queer Lives
Reynolds’s and Sameshima’s works transform memorabilia and shifts of shadow into poignant reflections of queerness. For Reynolds, ephemerality finds expression in artifacts of mourning and protest. In *Ray Navarro’s Bed of Mourning Flowers* (1990/2018), he immortalizes the funeral flowers of video artist Ray Navarro, whose ACT UP activism countered Catholic conservatism. Materials imbued with personal memory embody the ongoing negotiations of grief while underscoring the historical inextricability of queer identity and activism.
Another notable piece, *Felix Bead Curtain* (2018), pays homage to Félix González-Torres, a seminal queer artist known for bead curtain installations exploring the fragility of life and his battle with AIDS. Reynolds’s photographic rendition preserves the transient beauty of González-Torres’s motifs, while also underscoring a profound universality in the desire for connection and recognition in the face of mortality.
For Sameshima, the ephemeral takes a different form. His works, such as *Anonymous Berlin Stories* (2024) and *Anonymous Blue Movie* (2024), abstractly reimagine gay porn theaters and spaces of queer cruising in Berlin. These paintings blend silkscreen and acrylic techniques, resulting in half-veiled narratives that hover between autobiography and broader social commentary. They evoke the underground theaters as spaces of intimacy, defiance, and transience. Through their vague storytelling, these works whisper what cannot be fully revealed, mirroring queer history’s enduring struggles with visibility and vindication.
### Political, Historical, and Personal Intersections
Given the exhibition’s deeply political underpinnings, the artworks at times veer into activism themselves. Reynolds was closely tied to ACT UP (AIDS Coalition to Unleash Power), an organization synonymous with the fight for HIV/AIDS awareness, treatment, and stigma eradication. His pieces carry the raw indignation of the ACT UP ethos, transformations of anger into creative imagination. Meanwhile, the abstraction in Sameshima’s pieces critiques how societal shame often presses queer narratives into the shadows. Together, these artists offer a layered response to how queerness has been surveilled, repressed, cherished, and celebrated through generations.
One particularly moving Reynolds piece, *Moon Over Gerhard (FTL Bear Daddy Beach)* (2004), captures road signs, neon lights, and moonlit seascapes with an almost surreal quality. This photographic weaving abstracts cruising culture into something aspirational, depicting these spaces not simply as physical locations, but as sites for connection and utopia. Large-scale grids make these visual tales simultaneously celestial and earthbound, extending the limits of queer memory beyond the temporal.
### The Balance Between Particular and Universal
Despite the biographical nature of much of the work, both artists resist letting the personal dominate the narrative. Reynolds and Sameshima manage to signify individual experiences while tying them to larger currents of queer culture