POZ PLANET
BY TRENTON STRAUBE
MEET THE NEW When Vincent Chevalier and Ian Bradley-Perrin decided to collaborate on a poster for the direct-action arts project “poster/VIRUS”—part of Canada’s AIDS Action Now—they built upon the provocative phrase “Your Nostalgia Is Killing Me.” Their resulting poster depicts the bedroom of a teenager obsessed with AIDS. The artists found all the source materials online—including the laptop image of Gaetan Dugas, a.k.a. Patient Zero—and they used drafting program Google SketchUp, which was important, Chevalier says, “because the Internet and its viral character contributed to AIDS nostalgia. Everything is accessible without any context, and without that context, awareness just becomes empty. Our ’90s teenage bedroom is an ahistorical K-hole.” The imagery The imagery in refers to the the poster refers canon of AIDS to the developing art and activism. canon of both AIDS art and the history of AIDS activism— and to what gets left out of this canon. “The response has been mixed,” BradleyPerrin says. “For younger people, there’s an uneasiness to living in the shadow of such a huge legacy of political action. That being said, many people took a
statement about the politics of history as an attack on personal memory.” “Where I notice a type of nostalgia,” Chevalier says, “is from young artists recycling the same representational strategies. I mean, how may condom dresses have we all seen? We all know AIDS constantly
evolves, yet our cultural response seems to be stuck on auto-repeat.” Adds Bradley-Perrin: “The poster is a call for a conversation that needs to be had, rather than a reference to something that’s already being discussed in the community.”
POZ STORIES: Byanca Parker When Byanca Parker was told she was living with HIV, she reacted like most anyone would. “It was scary and confusing,” she recalls, adding that matters were further complicated because, “at the time, I had no idea what HIV was.” There was good reason for her lack of knowledge—she was in sixth grade. Parker was born with HIV in 1993. Learning about her status did explain a lot of mysterious aspects of her life, such as why she took so many pills and got sick more often than other kids—and why her mother’s health continued to deteriorate (she died of AIDS-related complications in 2003). Since learning of her status, Parker,
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who lives in Dallas, has gotten to know many other people who were born with HIV. “I don’t think it’s fair,” she says, “for an innocent baby to come into this world fighting for its life because the parents didn’t know their status.” Despite the challenges of living with HIV—Parker acknowledges that the side effects of her meds can be “sometimes overwhelming”—she has learned how to accept her status and, in the process, build her self-esteem. Today, Parker describes herself as a “persistent, optimistic and intelligent” person who is sharing her story. “I want to help motivate others to get tested,” she says. “I want to help save lives.”
To read more about Parker and other POZ Stories, or to tell your own tale of empowerment, visit poz.com/stories.
(POSTER) AIDS ACTION NOW/VINCENT CHEVALIER AND IAN BRADLEY-PERRIN; (PARKER) COURTESY OF BYANCA PARKER
AIDS POSTER CHILD
Hot Dates / June 5: National HIV/AIDS Long-Term Survivors Awareness Day /