I take my pill every morning and I observe its colour, the same pale blue used in a series of works by Felix Gonzalez-Torres, Loverboy, made between 1989 and 1991. Blue curtains, blue stacks of paper, blue lollies. The title suggests that the works are portraits, yet these monochromes do not depict a figure; instead, viewers are invited to experience something beyond the representation of homosexual love, a set of bodily relations facilitated by space and colour.
The blue used in Loverboy became a symbol that memorialised Ross Laycock, Gonzalez-Torres’s partner, who died of HIV/AIDS-related complications in 1991. Today, as I take my pill of the same blue shade, I think about the ways it will bolster my own body against the same fate. During the forced celibacy of the COVID-19 pandemic I stopped taking PrEP and my collection of unused pills became the dye for my work Untitled (Shroud). Here, the weave of the fabric metabolises the medicine in a way that a human body cannot: as pure colour. Bonded to the weave of the fabric, this Truvada-blue enables permutations of bodies in various states of decay, transformation and pleasure to combine within the stained fabric. A queer aesthetic staged by relations rather than figurations.
