Eric Avery

Eric Avery studied printmaking and later trained to become a physician. His artistic production blends these two practices, resulting in woodcuts that draw on his personal and professional history as a gay doctor to express the HIV-positive experience. In Blood Test, 1985, a woodcut on molded paper shows Avery’s veiny arm during the two weeks he waited for his HIV test results. The pulpy quality of the molded paper makes the background of the print resemble fluffy medical gauze. Most of the prints here also reference a broader visual history of health and disease.

One wall of the exhibition is mainly devoted to prints from his series “The New Face of AIDS – Patient Portraits in Frames of HIV Risk,” 1994–2011, which depict stories inspired by his HIV-positive patients. With permission, the artist made portraits of them and surrounded their likenesses with the type of scenes that may increase one’s likelihood of contracting the infection. At times, this moralizing mission seems to strip context from the subjects—in the piece Compulsive Sex, a frame made up of queer sex scenes does little to distinguish the risk factors between protected and unprotected sex, falsely implying that queerness itself is a factor.

A vitrine in the center of the room contains various artists’ books, including a digital letterpress pamphlet titled Pictures That Give Hope, 2001. While the zine appears to be simple, Avery considers this work his most successful project. It sidesteps the common pitfalls that haunt artistic responses to the AIDS crisis, allowing a directness that escapes heavy-handedness, a call to emotion that is not propaganda, and the display of a sick body that is not alone in its sickness.