Zachary Ayotte’s new work engages in remembrance and rethinking of the gradual disappearance of queer spaces in our city. BAMF is a series of human-scale images of bodies slipping into the aether, realized as black-and-white photographs. As they vanish, they leave behind trails of dust, the black air closing in and swallowing the spaces they leave behind. Ayotte is interested in the relationship of the physical—bodies and the spaces they inhabit—to our conceptual and political landscapes. When these places don’t stay open, how do they live on, and how do they inform our other approaches to community?
BAMF is exhibited in The Garage at Latitude 53 through 27 April.
Theodore Kerr is a Brooklyn-based writer, organizer and artist whose work focuses on HIV/AIDS, community and culture. As a writer, his work has appeared in the Village Voice, Poz Magazine, The Body, Lambda Literary, 18 Stories and other publications. This summer Kerr’s poster series WHEN IT STARTS will be on view as part of CounterPublics a festival of public art in St. Louis. Currently Kerr is teacher at The New School's Eugene Lang College of Liberal Arts in New York City. He is a founding member of What Would an HIV Doula Do?, the collective’s exhibition METANOIA: AIDS Transformation through AIDS Archives and Activism is on view at the NYC LGBT Center until the end of April.
Zachary Ayotte was born in Yellowknife, NT in 1981. He graduated from the University of Alberta in 2004 and went on to study photography at the North Alberta Institute of Technology.
His recent work is interested in the bounds of seeing and limits to how we engage with visual information. Drawing on the nature of photography itself, Ayotte is interested in exploring the way the invisible becomes apparent when it interacts with physical forms.
He works with 35mm and medium format film and utilizes a variety of both natural and artificial light sources.
He lives in Edmonton, AB.