Maybe I'm heading into another change. I hope so.* Curated by Matthias Herrmann

 
Each month, Visual AIDS invites guest curators, drawn from both the arts and AIDS communities, to select work from the Frank Moore Archive Project. This month, Matthias Herrmann curated the online web gallery Maybe I’m heading into another change. I hope so.* focusing on the artwork of Jimmy De Sana.

Curator's Statement:

When I first discovered Jimmy DeSana’s work (already quite late in my own career as an artist) it hit me hard: a feeling similar to the one Mapplethorpe described upon discovering 42nd street porn for the first time. Here’s an artist whose work is fresh and beautiful and sexy and intelligent and full of knowledge about his medium and its context (and how to expand it – we’re talking about the ’70s and ’80s), exuberant, overwhelming and overflowing with energy and >complete< in the best sense of the word. It’s dangerous work and at the same time it gives you a feeling of joy and makes you rejoice: ecco un artista. Still, there is not a single trace in any of DeSana’s works that caters to an idea of bourgeois decency. I reckon this makes him an outlaw and an insider at the same time (especially in the conservative American climate of the 1980s), depending on your point of departure...  (read more)

About the Curator:
Matthias Herrmann is an artist working with photography and he has used himself as a model in a lot of his work over the years. He feels the same as Jimmy DeSana when he observed: “It’s me looking at myself as a prop, as an object, but it is me”.


* "Maybe I'm heading into another change.  I hope so." quote by Jimmy DeSana in interview with Laurie Simmons

top image: Jimmy DeSana, Untitled (Smoke Self-Portrait), 1985, dye bleach photo, 10" x 8". Courtesy of the estate of Jimmy DeSana