One night in 1989, Hunter Reynolds, a 30-year-old artist who lived in New York City at the time, went home with the help of a friendly drag queen. He was intrigued by the result. His handsome face was neither male nor female, like Berlin’s androgynous cabaret star in the Weimar era. He wore a tweed coat and went to various art events. His friends didn’t recognize him, so he pretended to be a performance artist from Los Angeles.
As a gay man and artist, Reynolds was already interested in exploring the limits and possibilities of gender. As a member of ACT UP, a gay man recently diagnosed with HIV and a grassroots protest group founded by Larry Kramer and others, he eventually fights the illness that kills him, and with homosexual aversion. I was at the forefront of the battle. In the world of politics, healthcare and art, the battle has become very urgent. Creating art that focuses on his body will become increasingly important to him.
Eventually he developed his alter ego and called it Patina du Play. For Patina, Reynolds designed a gown wardrobe. Full skirt front yard figures made of satin, organdy and taffeta, showing off his hairy chest and muscular arms in a stiff torso shaped to fit Reynolds’ very male torso. The gown has become more sophisticated, as Patina’s performance did.
In one early piece, Patina wore a blue taffeta and hung from the gallery’s cage for hours at a time. 1992, “BanquetHeld in the Thread Wax Space of the Soho Gallery, he is a white satin gown printed with blood drops and an image of his collaborator Krisanne Statacos’ hair on a ballerina-like pedestal in a music box. So it turned slowly. Like roses and delicate vines — attendees eat light meals at banquets lined up with naked men, and women dressed as Maenad read feminist texts aloud. Reynolds and Statakas paid homage to the 1951 Surrealist work Méret Oppenheim’s “Spring Feast,” which served a meal for naked women, but they clearly gave men. I was using it.
One of Reynolds’ most inspiring works, and Patina’s Star Turn, was printed with the names of 25,000 AIDS victims taken from the AIDS quilt catalog he created as a living monument in 1993. It was a black satin gown. When Reynolds first announced it at the Boston gallery, he spun on the pedestal for hours, just like his practice, and people cried when they found the names of friends, family, and lovers.
Reynolds died at his home in Manhattan on June 12. He was 62 years old.Founder of Wendy Orsov PPOW gallery Tribeca stated that the cause was an aggressive form of squamous cell carcinoma.
“The hunter wore his pain and suffering, and he did so honestly and gracefully,” said the director of the Brooklyn Museum, formerly of Creative Time, a public art organization that collaborated with Reynolds in 1994. Anne Pasternak, the director of the museum, said that he exhibited works such as memorial dresses commemorating the 25th anniversary of the Stonewall uprising. Reynolds wore dresses everywhere in Manhattan and threw away his bodice on the stairs in the main building of the New York Public Library.
Pastelnack met Reynolds a few years ago when he curated his work at a gallery in Hartford, Connecticut, and appeared as one of the manados in “The Banquet.”
“He didn’t hide his HIV status,” she said in a telephone interview. “He especially wrapped himself in a memorial dress and focused his virus-infected body in it. I don’t think he could understand what courageous behavior it was at the time.
It was like saying, “Don’t look away.” And you couldn’t look away. There he spins on his platform and says, “This is me. This is us.'”
Hunter Wayne Reynolds was born to Robert on July 30, 1959 in Rochester, Minnesota. And Daniel (Dusau) Reynolds.
His parents divorced when the hunter was seven years old. The hunter grew up in Florida, moved to California at the age of 15, and lived with his father, who took a break from his job and tried to be an actor.
The hunter worked as a lifeguard, in the post office of an insurance company and accounting firm, as a disco dancer playing at a party, and as a phone sex worker. After earning a high school diploma, he attended the Otis Art Institute of Persons School of Design in Los Angeles (now Otis College of Art and Design), earned a BFA in 1984, and then moved to New York City.
Reynolds is the founder of ART + Positive, an ACTUP affinity group of activist artists inspired by flyers to protest homosexual aversion, and artwork and other actions by Helms AIDS Mendments sponsored by a conservative Republican senator. was. Jesse Helms banned federal funding for AIDS education.
In addition to Patina’s escape, Reynolds’ performance work included a series he called “mummification.” Due to his work, a more painstaking exercise, he was cocooned with wraps and box-sealing tape, pulled to the cart, or placed in a gallery or public park, after which his assistant was his assistant. I cut off the shell and released it.
He also made a two-dimensional work. His “Survival AIDS” series features articles about AIDS published in the New York Times, photo scans of his own work, splatters of his blood, and other images.
Among the many honors he has won, Reynolds Guggenheim scholarship In 2017.
Reynolds is surviving by his mother, who is now attending under the name Daniel English. His brothers, Mark Reynolds and Bryan Reynolds. And sister, Tasha Reynolds.
Patina traveled around the world, from Muscle Beach in Santa Monica to the Berlin Metro, Roman ruins to Gothic cathedrals. She often danced with passers-by, dressed in tulle clouds, and looked like a cross between the swirling Dervish and the bride. These images were captured by photographer Maxine Henrysoni.n Continuous 8 years of collaboration They called it “I-Dea The Goddess Within.”
In 1997, their work was exhibited at the Linda Kirkland Gallery in Manhattan. The show consisted primarily of photographs, but Patina’s white dress was also placed in the middle of the gallery, “as if frozen in the middle of Curtsy and surrounded by a halo of dried flowers,” Holland of the New York Times. Cotter writes in the review. “The emblem of generous but politically pointed out performance about liberation is still very ongoing,” he added.
