GALLERY 881
881 East Hastings Street
Vancouver, BC
Canada V6A 3Y1
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@gallery881_
DAVID: a Show About Mortality
by Bill Pusztai
Exhibition
July 25 - July 27, 2025
Opening Reception
Friday, July 25, 2025 from 5 - 9pm
Open for Viewing
Saturday, July 25, 2025 10 - 5pm
Sunday, July 26, 2025 10 - 5pm
EXHIBITION STATEMENT
[to be posted with “Why nudity?” on a movable wall blocking visibility of the show from the street.]
How does one be a friend to someone with a potentially terminal diagnosis?
As a wise woman once said to me, "the price of any love is that someone leaves first", so the task, with any friendship really, is to make the pain worthwhile. Or if one can't deal with the pain, one leaves in advance. You can only respect that decision, it cannot and should not be argued with, as it may be the most responsible choice for many people. How much worse to be a shitty friend when the remaining time is short?
I think this became clear to me in the 1980s. I worked for a nursing agency caring for people dying of AIDS (that sounds very clinical ... it was my community, my friends and lovers). Families regularly abandoned their children / siblings / parents / partners, and friends often disappeared. In addition to the shame around AIDS, there was also a shame around terminal illness, as if they has somehow failed their loved one, or maybe, they felt a taint by association. And many people have the attitude that if one can't have the expectation of "forever", it's not worth the effort (you see this with romantic relationships too, of course).
Most of us carry on with this sort of anticipation of "a long time", even if we're not thinking in terms of forever. Until we're forced to, we rarely think about the idea that everything we are or do has a definite termination point. When we're forced, we often think, well, what am I? why am I doing x, y and z? In that way, we have a big part of our identity stripped from us.
You can look at this body of work as me doing my best to be a good friend, whether or not there's a future in it. Be here now, as some guy once said. And a lot of it is informed by what David wanted in the moment - luckily, we are well aligned in those ways.
I frequently work with nude subjects. Very often just the subject, nude, on a plain backdrop. I reject the idea that a nude is either porn or sexless fine art (art without libido? what even is that?). I don't even try to fit into that framing of the issue, it is entirely inadequate to my lived experience. Because of that I also reject the standard ideas about the kinds of bodies that should be represented. We all know the litany - young, thin, white, cis. Ironically those standards all seem to be based around the viewer finding the subject (object) to be desirable - even, or especially, when it's not porn.
So is this porn? I would say, definitively not. To me porn is art mainly about sex. Without erasing David's sexuality, I don't think that's the main theme in these photos - although it can't entirely *not* be there either.
All those ideas came together for me in the "Cut Piece" inspired shoot. "Cut Piece" was performance art, first instantiated by Yoko Ono in 1964, and I had been thinking about it because 2024 was the 60th anniversary. In the original, Yoko sat still and allowed people to snip pieces of her clothing and carry them away. It's a very complex piece, but important to me at the time were ideas about the violence of being stripped by other people, in a context where clothing can be understood as public identity or perhaps protection. Meanwhile I'm thinking about David, who's being stripped of his identity by a potentially-terminal diagnosis. Undressing himself, in an unmistakable and irreversable way.
This show contains nudity, so please do not view it if that is illegal for you or you just don't want to see it.
WHY NUDITY?
Some ideas.
Nudity can be an expression of openness, and through the process of being intently seen, of revelation. It defies the judgemental viewer who insists that it's ugly, or that particular bodies are ugly. The difference between having clothing cut from one's body by other people, as opposed to removing one's own, is the difference between an attack and self-revelation.
In this context, this sort of revelation is an emotional preparation for a process that's going to strip away many of the niceties of polite society. Cancer is not polite, radiation is not polite, chemo is not polite, they are all blunt force and counter-force. There's a stark lesson in the difference between what's truly necessary and what just feels necessary because of social conventions.
Nudity is also a reminder that in almost all human expression, sex - by its presence or absence - is a part of the text or subtext. Sick people and disabled people are routinely desexualised, ostensibly to protect them, but it's pretty clear it doesn't; all it does is give abusers a good cover story. It's a problem that cannot be dealt with without granting people their sexuality and the autonomy to manage it, everywhere, all the time.
When people are sick they often feel betrayed by their body and distanced from it. A lot of people have that feeling about aging as well. One's body being witnessed by another human being can be a piece of bringing sense of self and body back together.
ARTIST BIOGRAPHY
I was born in 1965, and spent the first 18 years of my life in Hamilton, a post-industrial town on the southern tip of Lake Ontario in South-eastern Canada.
I left in 1984 to go to University in Toronto, and on the side studied Western and Chinese calligraphy & painting; that was interrupted by the AIDS die-off of the late 80s and early 90s. I wasn't able to get back to studying visual expression until the late 90s, when I started a four year Graphic Design program at Ontario College of Art and Design (now OCAD University), graduating with a diploma approximately equivalent to a Bachelor of Design (Associate of the Ontario College of Art & Design, 2002). While there I started working with one of the old Mavica digital cameras that used 3.5" disks for storage; I was hooked.
I had a studio in Toronto from 2003 until I moved to Vancouver BC in 2011. At present I work out of my studio in Vancouver (see Contact page). I have occasional gallery shows, most recently at garner narrative gallery of contemporary fine art, but mostly my work is seen online or in publications like Teufelsfeige un Witwenblume, Historische Zierpflanzen - Geschichte, Botanik, Verwendung (Devil's Fig and Scabious, Historic Ornamentals - History, Botany, Use) by Bartha-Pichler, Geiser, and Zuber (Pro Specie Rara / CMVerlag), the National Geographic Illustrated Guide to Nature: From Your Back Door to the Great Outdoors (National Geographic Society), Lighting, the Soul of Car Design by Driving Vision News, and Utne Reader.
In 2013, Clark Nikolai made a short art-house documentary about me, Bill is a Photographer. It plays now and again at LGBT film festivals.
Hello, Goodbye, 2024 01 05 - 01
Bill Pusztai