Outside the Lines

Brice Canyon

As someone who can pass for a normal, healthy, white male on the streets of Vancouver, I have had a difficult time finding ways to express and represent the experience of having AIDS and how that acts as a disability. Having lived with the spectre of HIV/AIDS since 1987, it has become a part of my daily reality, so much so that I can honestly say one or two days can go by where I don’t even think of it. Through the mystery of modern medicine I am alive, after a two year period where death seemed imminent. This is not to say that is no longer important to me, but in fact it has become such a part of me, it is only when it is called into question by others or outside situations that I have reason to reflect upon it.

Portrait
ink jet print

In my art work, using at different times both video and Xerox, I have been tempted less to speak directly about AIDS per se, than I have to deal with the surrounding issues. The stigma that is attached to sexually transmitted disease and the confusion of information available in AIDS/HIV seemed to me more pressing. Later I became more interested in the human body as an aspect of nature, and how that related to death and decay. Now, working collaboratively with my boyfriend Claude Perreault, an artist living and working in Montreal, we are focusing on the strength and courage that results from an emotional and spiritual union. The fact that he is HIV negative points to the levels of trust and intimacy that are needed as part of living with an ongoing disease.

This portrait reflects the positive aspects emotional and spiritual support have on healing and continuing with life in the face of a disability.

Karen Chapnick