“My curatorial residency with Visual AIDS in March of 2015 inspired this web gallery. I was particularly interested in the archaeology of an archive and the dissection between memory and nostalgia and threads that connect.
Coming from Australia I was inspired by the work of artist and activist David McDiarmid, who passed away in 1995, and whose work was recently featured in the retrospective When This You See Remember Me at the National Gallery of Victoria. I was interested in his years in New York in the late 1970’s and 1980’s enjoying the art, fashion and music scenes, the piers, gallery hopping and gay pride marches. Chatter from friends and writings by David himself placed him in New York during the early 1980’s attending Gay Pride marches. I visited the archives of The Lesbian, Gay, Bisexual & Transgender Center in New York and looked through the photographs of Steve Zabel and his ongoing documentation of Gay Pride marches through the streets of New York – men in short frayed denim shorts, women in dungarees…looking for David…”
