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For those managing chronic illness, life’s rhythm is shot through with incessant obligations that interrupt (and perhaps direct) the flow of relationships to one’s surroundings, familiars, and, ultimately, oneself. As a long-term survivor of HIV, artist Joey Terrill perhaps knows this better than most. Works in his recent solo presentation at Marc Selwyn, such as Still-Life with Crixivan, Zerit, and Viagra, 2000—an early example from a magnificent suite of still lifes populating the galleries—revealed the artist’s practice of arranging as a mode of compositional becoming. Here daily doses of the HIV medications Crixivan and Zerit are attached directly to the canvas (Terrill was a participant in a UCLA trial for the first of these), while an elephantine-scale image of a Viagra tablet—easily discernible by its blue color and lozenge shape, and by the imprinted logo of the pharmaceutical company that produces it—is collaged on, as if to playfully indicate the enlargement it promises. Also appearing on this serape-covered table, whose occluded edge rises to meet the horizon, is an open jar of Kraft strawberry preserves, some fruit (har har), a leafy sprig, and a fecund, open white rose. Set apart from the table, against a prototypical blue sky and grass-green ground, is a collaged black-and-white photograph of an Eero Saarinen Tulip chair. This scene, window-like and more diminutive than most others presented here, was framed by running bands of wallpaper that ruffled and rulered the pictorial space with equal effulgence and precision. Comfortable Executive Chair
By dint of circumstance, Terrill obtained an education in interior design, when, in the 1980s, he and his then-boyfriend worked for a handful of designers retained by the upwardly mobile mansion dwellers of Southern California. An example of this affinity can be gleaned from the work, Still-Life with Crixivan, 1997–98, part of an ongoing series of the same title, and which features William Morris’s iconic, dizzying repeats of willow boughs.
To learn this and other various details about the artist’s practice, visitors could pick up a stapled zine bearing the exhibition’s title (“Still Here”) at the gallery’s front counter. Those already familiar with Terrill from the pathbreaking 2017 exhibition “Axis Mundo: Queer Networks in Chicano L.A.” (curated by C. Ondine Chavoya and David Evans Frantz) were inevitably reminded of the artist’s history as a zine-maker (Homeboy Beautiful, 1978–79 and Chicos Modernos, 1989–92). Yet, in these freshly photocopied pages we learn more about Terrill’s activist and artistic beginnings as a volunteer for La Huelga(Cesar Chavez’s farmworkers’ unionization movement), his participation in the Chicano Moratorium in 1970, and his eventual matriculation into Immaculate Heart College’s art department in the wake of Sister Corita Kent’s departure. Most of this information is revealed in an interview with curator Rafael Barrientos Martínez, who organized a presentation of the artist’s work last year at New York’s Ortuzar Projects. In it, the artist also describes how his still lifes came to be:
I had been involved with advocacy related to drug pricing, pushing for pharmaceutical companies to be more sensitive to the communities most impacted by HIV and AIDS. I wanted to create art about it, but I couldn’t figure out how. . . . I was sitting at my breakfast table with my HIV medications sitting in front of me beside a box of Cheerios that I thought to myself, “Oh, this is funny. It looks like a Tom Wesselmann still life.” . . . But the goal was to Mexicanize and queer-ize my versions.
The same strategy of co-opting Pop sensibility to Chicano queer ends was deployed in a concise hang of works in the smallest room of the gallery. Among these was My Friend Peter (LOSS), 1998–2023, which conjoins a version of Robert Indiana’s riff-prone LOVE logotype (here it’s LOSS) with a painted portrait of two men, arms around each other, staring into the too-bright flash of a camera. Mute blues and taupes balance against the painted photograph’s darkened background, threatening to plunge its two subjects into oblivion. These men, seated upon upholstered banquet chairs (not a Saarinen in sight), blurry and slightly dazed, are revelers in their own intimacy. Their friendship is now and forever sentry against the cruelties of linear time.
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