Richard is an old and dear friend, someone I hold in high esteem. He has been at the fore front of gay rights and activism in Toronto for decades. I have been inspired by Richard’s video work which focuses on the role of gay Asian men in pornography, while addressing the intersections between colonialism, immigration, racism, homophobia, and AIDS. He is an artist, public intellectual, theorist and writer. Richard was the first in a new series of conceptual portraits I have been imagining.
Abigail Hadeed has been documenting the Caribbean and the Americas for the past 30 years. Hadeed’s archives owe much to her uncanny ability to discover people and places at the crossroads of an unresolved past and an impending future, torn between pain and possibility, disquiet and hope. My last exhibition The Weight of Water was a meditation on nature and alienation…pollution, consumption, and the link between environmental and spiritual degradation. Unpeopled and introspective, It coursed through Trinidad’s waters to as far north as the Bahamas archipelago.
