This Sunday, Northwestern University’s Block Museum of Art will present a free program of short films featuring artist David Wojnarowicz, who died in 1992 of complications from AIDS. At the same time, the Rogers Park gallery Iceberg Projects is presenting David Wojnarowicz: Flesh of My Flesh, an exhibit of his visual art, through August 4. These two events mark the first major memorials to Wojnarowicz in Chicago, coinciding with an exhibit of his work at the Whitney Museum of Art in New York City. Moreover, they remind us of the many artists lost to AIDS in the 1980s and ’90s. Wojnarowicz, one of the most prominent of them, tackled the AIDS epidemic in sculptures, paintings, writings, performance art, and video art, creating a formidable body of work that spectators are still catching up with.
Wojnarowicz employed visual metaphors in some of his other works. In his painting North/South: The New Legionnaires (1986), on display at Iceberg Projects, an abattoir with hanging beef carcasses coexists with images that represent society in decline, such as the Titanic heading for an iceberg or the Parthenon in ruins. In his video ITSOFOMO (in the shadow of forward motion) (1991), screening Sunday, an accelerating montage of trains, spinning globes, and found video footage communicate the artist’s rapidly deteriorating health. (Wojnarowicz completed the piece roughly a year before his death.) Wojnarowicz narrates over the images, condemning the U.S. as a “one-tribe nation,” which lends the occasionally obscure imagery a sense of anger and urgency. The most powerful short on the program, ITSOFOMO speaks to the creativity and raw emotion Wojnarowicz brought to his experience and the social situation.
David Wojnarowicz: Flesh of My Flesh Through Sat 8/4. Iceberg Projects, 7714 N. Sheridan, icebergchicago.com, FREE
