EVERYTHING TO GAIN, 2008
EVERYTHING TO GAIN (installation video), 2008, two channel video installation, dimensions variable
Ivan LOZANO’s Everything to Gain summons the spirits of queer histories. Images from underground filmmaker Mike Kuchar‘s 1966 16mm short film The Secret of Wendell Sampson, a character study of a closeted homosexual’s psychotic breakdown, are laboriously rephotographed —from DVD to black and white Super-8 film to point-and-shoot consumer grade still camera in “movie mode”—to create a two-channel video portrait of the mind-body schism imposed on previous generations of gay men by homophobic social structures. The “mind” is represented by a barely seen image of a man repeatedly turning his back to us in defeat and shame, trapped in the box of the monitor, while a wall-sized projection presents and makes the spectral body tangible, writhing, bound in spiderweb-like rope, struggling and unable to escape. The title, taken from a speech by ACT UP founder Larry Kramer is a reminder that the fight Lozano invokes is an old fight, one that isn’t over yet.
-Risa Puleo
