Brandon Anschultz

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Time Won’t Give Me Time

Terminal 1 Ticketing Lounge, Lambert International Airport, St. Louis.

Exhibition Dates: May 16, 2018 – November 26, 2018

The works presented here are part of a series loosely titled Time Won’t Give Me Time.  In this work, I am reflecting on my experience of growing up as a gay kid in the mid 1980’s.  In particular, the work examines the deep cultural ambivalences and contradictions that queer people faced in a time of tumultuous change.  On one hand, the work recalls a new sense of possibility for gay youth of the period, who grew up with a novel sense of a broader gay community, as well as exposure to non-heteronormative cultural icons like Boy George and Madonna, who celebrated the joyful creativity of gay club culture and ruled the pop music and music video landscapes. On the other hand, the era also witnessed the AIDS epidemic’s breakthrough into national consciousness, and the trauma of forming one’s sexual identity in the midst of such turbulence.

Joy, fear, rage and sadness.  The two works presented here, Disco (White Triangle, Pink Triangle, Black Triangle) & After Party strive to balance these emotions.

In Disco, three triangular mirror plinths hold three colors of sand and glitter.  Their triangular shape recalls the pink triangle that the Nazi’s used to identify queer people in concentration camps: our Jewish Star.  With the addition of black and white, they can be read as symbols of life and death, depending on cultural associations.  In After Party, a black disco-ball harkens back to the end of the 1970’s.  In this iteration, I am presenting the disco-ball atop a mahogany base, loosely in the shape of the top of a coffin.  The piece is both a celebration and a memorial for the time of transition of the gay liberation movement into the beginning of the AIDS crisis of the early 1980’s.