Hunter Reynolds and Dean Sameshima’s Memorials to Queer Loss
A two-person, intergenerational display represents two drastically opposed approaches to queer history.
by Qingyuan Deng 
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This dual exhibition often operates at the register of biographical reading, while simultaneously resisting full clarity, due to both artists’ strategies of presenting ephemera as evidence and traces of queerness as sites of emotional truth. For instance, working both along and against the grain of contemporary modes of grievance (think, “say their names”), Reynolds’s “Ray Navarro’s Bed of Mourning Flowers” (1990/2018) pays tribute to the eponymous video artist who dressed up as Jesus outside St. Patrick’s Cathedral to protest the Catholic Church’s conservative teachings on sexuality through what are presumably photoprints of Navarro’s funeral flowers. Appendages of mourning are similarly given prominence in the adjacent “Felix Bead Curtain” (2018), an assemblage of light and shadow studies of Félix González-Torres’ bead curtain installations about experiences of battling AIDS and approaching death.
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Elsewhere, biographical details are elided in favor of documentation of more general truths. Reynolds’s “Moon Over Gerhard (FTL Bear Daddy Beach)” (2004) transforms the sexual bravado of cruising into abstract photography capturing auras of utopian desire via a grid of long exposure shoots of road signs, neon lights, and the moon above a beach. And Sameshima’s abstractions of his experiences of visiting gay porn theaters in Berlin in works such as “Anonymous Berlin Stories” and “Anonymous Blue Movie” (2024) feel like shrouded biography: half hidden, half revealed.
Hunter Reynolds / Dean Sameshima: Promiscuous Rage continues at PPOW (392 Broadway, Tribeca, Manhattan) through January 25, 2025.The exhibition was organized by the gallery.
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