April 2012
La Petite Mort Gallery presents
DEVIN ELIJAH / POLAROIDS
A Chronicle of Love & Loss in Sickness & in Health
April 13 – 29, 2012
The artist will present from New York City on opening night.
There will also be an artist talk on Saturday April 14 / 2pm @ La Petite Mort Gallery.
This project is funded in part through a U.S. Department of State,
U.S. Embassy-Ottawa Public Affairs Section Grant.
Artist Statement:
“Janet Rochelle Schwartz died of AIDS on April 16th, 1990, the day before her husband’s 39th birthday. A nurse, living and working in San Francisco through the 70′s and early 80′s, she was one of the first documented cases of women with HIV/AIDS during that era, when AIDS had a prevalent & increasingly, excruciatingly volatile face, but was still without a name, unbiased, no ties to true humanity, bound to all yet unbound from every, equally cryptic in nature as elementary in its aim for destruction. She was just 38, I was 6 years old at the time and the youngest of her three children. General Idea’s IMAGEVIRUS series was establishing itself in both SF and NY—the AIDS poster project first appeared on the streets of San Francisco in 1988—in the very years that my mother’s physical self was disengaging from the world. I met AA around 2008, twenty years after my mother’s death, initially to take his portrait; eventually he became a friend and mentor. I hope that he sees in me what I wish to see in myself: a potential for the profound, still searching the intangible elusiveness of my deepest self. Perhaps AA sees through my eyes where he’s been but can’t entirely remember, as much as I am able to go where the circumstance of age may never fully allow him.
I wrote this when I was 21 years old:
“Put the beard on my face and put the hair on my chest
Tie the shoe on my lace and lick the wounds of my flesh
There was a time when in mother’s womb I would rest
Until the reaper said ‘There’s no more room in her nest’
They say the good ones perish younger then most
And their children end up trapped under their ghost
The worlds a cracked kaleidoscope if you look at it close
Most days I choose not to look at it close”
These photographs are a story about my New York, the one in which I came of age.Attempting to capture it as a manifesto to my truth, that we, my subjects and myself, might harness those moments in time. Soon enough New York City will change once more, altering itself within our hands & beyond present recognition; it’s landscape & many of the faces that line the pages of this series will be swept away in its ever metamorphosing tide.
The Polaroids reflect the magnetic duality of two souls journeying on a parallel course, the two of us brought together in a friendship that I hope will help each propel forward the other’s story. There are 38 years between us this present day, the exact duration of my mother’s worldly sojourn. I think of us as two beacons, representing the faded beauty of the past and the already fleeting yet unforeseen promise of the future.This collection of Polaroids, a continual work in progress will be my anchor, perhaps in some regard all of ours, albeit the remembrance of our albatross all at once.
Perhaps our lives were fated to intersect here in New York City. This universal crossroads, the one that holds a mirror to our glory and our grief, inevitably dividing the savage from the saint inside.”. – Devin Elijah, 2012
Merci,
Guy Berube, director
La Petite Mort Gallery
