Screen print on paper, 2023
My focus for this project is the HIV/AIDS epidemic of the 1980s and how it is still very relevant within the LGBTQIA+ community to this current day.
When AIDS was first discovered in the US, its severity was disregarded and ignored, people’s symptoms were invalidated, and overall seen as a joke, thanks to Ronald Reagan. In turn, hundreds of thousands of people died because their sickness was deemed "insignificant" to the careless, white supremacist elitists running this country.
The addition of the decorative mirror on top of my wallpaper print, I hope to communicate that people with HIV/AIDS are out there and can exist within the same spaces. They are people just like us. Along with this, it also serves as a self-reflection piece; a queer individual apart of a community that receives so much bias and hate.
Real life perspectives, art, and photography from queer artists like Keith Haring, Robert Mapplethorpe, and Mark Morrisroe, all who were living during the height of this epidemic, were the primary inspiration for this piece. With subtle symbols like green carnations and gender ambiguous persons, I hope to represent various identities within the community.