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Paul LeRoy Gehres | Homer City, Pennslyvania | artist website A response to the AIDS epidemic among gay men during the nineteen nineties, Paul LeRoy Gehres’s Exclamation Points laugh in the face of the grim reaper. “Parties during the Gay 90’s were super fun and really fabulous but somebody was always dying. Gay men were dropping faster than their flies. So we dressed the sickies up as movie stars, pranced around in women’s clothing and cackled at the Grim Reaper,’ writes Gehres of the subject time of his mixed media collages. Using decorative materials often associated with crafts and other traditionally feminine forms of art making, Gehres assembles a tribute to the men who loved to dress up in women’s clothing and who survived the early years of the AIDS epidemic. Gehres describes his use of polka dots as a strategy similar to that used by Japanese artist, Yayoi Kusama with which she signified the sexual disease of society. Gehres also used a process he called “obsessive repetitive stapling” to attach the dots and photos to the exclamation point shapes. This compulsive attempt to knit together fragments of paper, photographs, and cloth is Gehres’s attempt to hold on to something that was slipping away, like the lives of gay men during the AIDS epidemic. Gehres also notes in his own writing about Exclamation Point, “that profuse decoration has frequently been associated with ‘gender bending’ and it has become a sign of ‘queerness’ as used in current academic parlance.” Through this reference to current theoretical readings of art practice, Gehres is doubly confirming his position outside of the traditional male role. Not only do his subjects dress to contest the simple male/female binary, but his methods and materials reinforce the “queering” of the artmaking process itself. - by Crystal Atry
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